The expansion of the preposition para in ditransitive sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: the perspective of the three factors model

Abstract

Synchronic and diachronic corpora show that when compared to European Portuguese (EP), Brazilian Portuguese (BP) displays two innovative properties regarding the morphosyntactic realization of the indirect object (IO) in ditransitives. In its nominal expression, the preposition a - a case marker - is replaced by the lexical preposition para – O Pedro deu um celular à namorada/deu um celular para a namorada. ‘Pedro gave his girlfriend a cell phone / he gave his girlfriend a cell phone’. In its 3rd person pronominal expression, the dative clitics lhe/lhes are replaced by the oblique pronouns ele(s), ela(s), introduced by the prepositions a/para – O Pedro deu-lhe um celular/ deu um celular a/para ela, ‘Pedro gave her a cell phone/gave a cell phone to/for her’. The aim of this paper is to present a proposal for understanding the following question: Why BP speakers, during the centuries of its expansion in Brazil, have converged to a grammatical system divergent  from the linguistic input provided by spokens and written Portuguese? Our answer is based on a minimalist approach to acquisition, variation and change as outlined in the Three Factors model (Chomsky, 2005), highlighting the input (Factor 2), and the general cognitive aspects related to thje speaker's interaction with the linguistic input (Factor 3). We assume, based on Roberts (2007), Roberts and Roussou (2003), Biberauer (2018, 2019) and Biberauer and Roberts (2017), that the linguistic effects of cognitive biases, namely: (i) Feature economy - Postulate the least formal features when interacting with the input; (ii) Input Generalization - Make the most out of the available in features when dealing with the input.