The variation between null subject sand lexical pronouns in European Portuguese from the 16th to the 19th Century: a corpus-based study

• Grant number: 16/03848-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2016
• End date: April 30, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Historical Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves
• Grantee: Débora de Souza Valencia
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 12/06078-9 - Portuguese in time and space: linguistic contact, grammars in competition and parametric change, AP.TEM

Abstract

The goal of this project is to map the syntactic and discursive contexts in which null subjects appear in opposition to lexical personal pronouns in European Portuguese from the 16th to the 19th centuries, on the basis of 16 texts of the Tycho Brahe Corpus. The use of null subjects in the history of European Portuguese was already studied, but there are no specific studies on the contexts of its occurrence. In previous research it was shown that null subjects are very frequent in the period considered by this study (Carpani 2012) but there was a diminution of its occurrence from the 18th century on. In this project, it is aimed to observe a possible change in the contexts of use of null subjects across time. (AU)