NULL SUBJECT AND PRONOMINAL SUBJECT: DIACHRONIC STUDY IN BRAZILIAN AND PORTUGUESE LETTERS OF THE 17TH TO 20TH CENTURIES.

• Grant number: 22/02528-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2022
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Historical Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves
• Grantee: Isabella Spatti Candido
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Based on the theory of generative grammar, this research will seek to study the evolution of brazilian portuguese syntax having as object of study the phenomenon of the null subject since the 17th century, a much debated issue in linguistics since the postulation by Chomsky (1981) of the pro-drop parameter. The theme gained prominence in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) due to the peculiarities of its interpretation and distribution, as demonstrated by Duarte's research (1993, 1995, 2018); Duarte, Mourão and Mendonça (2012); Gravina (2008, 2014).The purpose of this work is to analyze the variation between null and pronominal subjects, their occurrence and syntactic contexts in Portuguese letters (from the 17th to the 19th) and Brazilian letters from the 17th to the 20th centuries present in syntactically annotated electronic corpora. Little is known linguistically about the centuries before the 19th and bringing recently edited texts from the 17th and 18th centuries to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the history of Portuguese in Brazil, it is expected to answer the following questions: What is the evolution of null and pronominal subjects in texts written in Brazil since the 17th century? What do these new data tell us about the emergence of a new grammar in colonial Brazil? What are the differences when compared with the Portuguese data? What would be the competing grammars (KROCH, 1989) involved in change? The research is justified because it can contribute to the knowledge about the history of Brazilian Portuguese, from a subject that, despite having been widely studied, has received new treatments in recent literature, in particular on the existence of a typology of null subjects. In addition, it stands out for using syntactically annotated corpora, dealing with a large amount of data reliably and for presenting itself as a result of collaborative work.