Pronominal order in Brazilian Portuguese: from enclisis to proclisis, from clitic to tonic (or There and Back Again, a Word Order’s Holiday)

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2017v14n1p1717

We investigate the grammatical motivations (i) behind the change from enclisis to proclisis that took place in the nineteenth century, and (ii) behind the increase of the tonic pronoun as a verbal complement. The central hypothesis here is that the tonic pronoun (and the consequent abandon lost of the clitic) is an attempt to recover the SVO order in Brazilian Portuguese that was abandoned when, by the nineteenth century, proclisis became categorical: SO_cliticV. We explain the phenomenon within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993). OT allowed us to investigate the constraints involved in this phenomenon and the hierarchy  for these constraints (as well as the change of this hierarchy over time), and that was a crucial point to explain of the changes of pronominal collocation in BP. We conclude that the implementation of the tonic pronoun as direct object has been consolidated first with the third person pronouns (and with the ‘nominal pronouns’, such as “você” and “a gente”) and that the tendency is, we believe, for this strategy to generalize for all the other pronouns in BP.