The scrambling of direct object in the European Portuguese diachrony

Abstract

This work aimed to show the results of the study of scrambling of non clitic accusative NPs in completive clauses in texts from the 12^th to the 19^th century. We analyzed the possibilities of ordering direct object in relation to the verb and the subject in two corpora: the Computerized Corpus of Medieval Portuguese – CIPM, for texts from the 12^th, 13^th and14^th centuries and the Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese– CTB, for texts from 16^thc and the 19^th centuries. The CIPM data were extracted by following the methodology based on reading of the texts, separation the sentences by means of the established criteria and the subsequent classification according to the order into eight distinct groups: VO, SVO, VSO, VOS, OV, SOV, OVS and OSV. The CTB data were extracted by following the methodology called Corpus Search and underwent the same criteria adopted for the CIPM data. The results point to a low frequency of the direct object fronting (OV, SOV, OSV and OVS) in both corpora in the context of subordinate completive clauses. Low frequency was also found for the use of the inversions VOS and VSO in the same clausal context.