Historical study of the acussative 2nd person singular complement

Abstract

The aim of this work is to study the variation of the 2nd person accusative complements over the course of a century (1880-1980). Besides the clitic te, which is found in grammatical tradition, other forms may also occur in Brazilian Portuguese, such as the pronoun você, the clitics lhe and o/a or even a null object. Therefore, we use a corpus composed of 504 personal letters written in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The theoretical-methodological framework used is based on historical Sociolinguistics (ROMAINE, 1982; CONDE SILVESTRE, 2007; HERNÀNDEX-CAMPOY; CONDE SILVESTRE, 2012). In sum, this research has shown that the most frequent accusative strategy was the clitic te, regardless of the address form used in the subject position (tu, você or tu~você) in familiar and love letters throughout the studied century.