Pronominal subject realization in two excerpts of the 20th century: an analysis of written data from the city of Manaus (AM)

Abstract

This paper deals with the filling of the subject pronoun in advertisements published by Jornal do Commercio, state of Amazonas, the oldest that is still in circulation. For this research, ads from the first decade of the 20^th century (1904-1908) and the penultimate decade of the same century (1980-1987) were selected. The objectives of this study are (i) to analyze the filling of the pronominal subject in these two-time frames and (ii) to discuss if the Brazilian Portuguese of Amazonas is in a process of linguistic change, towards the filling of the pronominal subject. We worked with 131 advertisements and obtained 607 occurrences, in declarative sentences, including 466 categorized as null subject and 141 as overt pronominal subject. The following independent variables were controlled: person of speech, form of pronoun, verb tense, nominal form of the verb, subject’s animacy (linguistic) and time frame (extralinguistic). The result showed that, taking the data of the two cutouts into consideration, the variables that most favor the null subject are: temporal cut and person of speech. When the analysis considers the time frames separately, our research showed that both in period I and in period II, the variables that favor the null subject are the person of the speech and the form of the pronoun. We also verified that the subject's filling rates increase in period II in relation to period I, a fact that corroborates the hypothesis that the Brazilian Portuguese is increasingly becoming a partial null subject language.