Spanish and Portuguese: the personal pronouns subject in written productions in non-maternal language

• Grant number: 17/09732-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: June 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Applied Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Rosa Yokota
• Grantee: Jéssica Rodrigues Rosa
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

According to Kato and Duarte (2014), the Brazilian Portuguese has been changing and removing from the European Portuguese and the pro-drop languages, in which are possible to have a null-subject. Supposedly due to the introduction of the new pronouns "a gente" and "você", which are conjugated as" zero person", it's necessary to explicit the subject in the clause by filling its subject argument. By contrast, according to Soriano (1999), in Spanish personal pronouns should be avoided if their use is not considered necessary. This distance in the syntax of Spanish and Portuguese generated what González called "inverse asymmetry" between the two languages because, while in Spanish filling the unstressed pronouns with completion function is compulsory and there is a recommendation of using the tonic only in specific contexts, in Brazilian Portuguese there is a tendency to use less and less the unstressed pronouns and more the tonics. Almeida Filho (2004) says that Brazilian learners of Spanish may have similar problems to those of Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese in their productions. Studies by González (1994) and Rosa (2017) show us that the excess and the lack of use of personal subject pronouns can lead to problems of clauses comprehension. Based on these studies, we intend to investigate through this research if Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese and Brazilian learners of Spanish productions have resemblances as whether they use or not the personal pronouns subjectin a foreign language. (Portuguese and Spanish). (AU)