Aspects of portuguese historical grammar: interpolation, negation and change

Author(s)

Cristiane dos Santos Namiuti

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2008-02-25

Examining board members

Charlotte Galves; Anna Maria Martins; Maria Aparecida Correa Ribeiro Torres Morais; Ilza Ribeiro; Maria Clara Paixão de Sousa

• Advisor: Charlotte Galves

Abstract

In this Dissertation I present and discuss the phenomenon of interpolation in texts of Portuguese authors born from the 15th to the 19th Century, drawn from the Annotated Corpus of Historical Portuguese - Tycho Brahe. The theory Principles and Parameters of Generative Grammar is the analysis¿ background (cf. Chomsky, 1995). In comparison with the same phenomenon in Old Portuguese, we can see that the interpolation of negation extends to new contexts: we find ¿não¿ interpolated in root clauses without any proclitic operator before the clitic as well as in non-finite contexts in which proclisis is not categorical. The first occurrences appearing in those new contexts are found in texts written at the end of the 15th Century and they are frequent in the texts of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Classical Portuguese, according to traditional periodization). I show that the interpolation of VP constituents disappeared from the texts from the 16th Century on. At the same time we find a strong proclitic pattern in root neutral clauses 'XP-verb¿ (see Galves, Britto and Paixão de Sousa 2005). We can also see that the non adjacency of the complementizer and the clitic became more common at the same period. I argue that the proclitic pattern found in matrix clauses during the 16th and the 17th Century is correlated with the loss of XP¿s interpolation. The new contexts of neg-interpolation derive from this proclitic pattern in root clauses. Later, when enclisis becomes the rule, this kind of neg-interpolation is lost. Therefore, these results evidence an intermediate state of grammar in the history of Portuguese, between Old Portuguese (13th and 14th Centuries) and Modern Portuguese (18th Century on). Galves (2004) called it Middle Portuguese. Following Martins (1994), I assume the existence of a polarity functional category in clause¿ structure - called _P - located between CP and IP. And, I hypothesize that Old Portuguese grammar has a clitic that it can move to Cº, while Middle Portuguese grammar has a clitic that it can not move to C° head, it needs to stop in _° head. In Modern European Portuguese, the clitic can¿t move above I°. About the variation in the position of pronominal clitics in negative sentences on diachronical Portuguese texts, especially on Middle and Modern Portuguese, I defend the hypothesis that it can be explained by the clitic nature of the negative operator. Being the negative operator the realization of the negative polarity of _°, the incorporation of _-Neg° and verb is obligatory. And, since pronominal clitics obey morpho-phonological restrictions, I explain the three grammars into Distribute Morphology theory to get better the prosodic invertion processes and the incorporation (AU)