A mudança na distribuição das formas possessivas seu e dele: um estudo sobre textos de dramaturgia do português clássico ao brasileiro

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the variation between the third-person possessive forms seu and dele (and their inflected forms) in Portuguese and Brazilian dramatic texts, spanning from the 16th to the 20th century. Adopting the framework of variationist sociolinguistics (cf. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 2006 [1968]; Labov, 1972; Tagliamonte, 2006), the study aims to analytically describe the distributional shift between these forms, seeking to identify potential motivations for this change in the linguistic system from Classical Portuguese to modern Brazilian Portuguese. The central hypothesis is that the choice between the two forms is influenced by semantic features of the possessor referent (Oliveira e Silva, 1984, 1996; Müller, 1997b; Moura Neves, 2011; Guedes, 2015, 2017; Lopes & Guedes, 2020). Additionally, a diachronic shift is expected to underlie this variation, as the increasing use of dele in Brazilian Portuguese appears to correlate with the incorporation of the pronoun você into the pronominal paradigm of the language (Lopes & Rumeu, 2007; Rocha, 2009). Data were primarily drawn from the Tycho Brahe Historical Portuguese Corpus (Galves, Andrade & Faria, 2017), totaling 554 occurrences classified according to seven independent linguistic variables. A multivariate analysis conducted using the GoldVarb X statistical program identified five statistically significant factor groups influencing the distribution of seu and dele: the position of the possessor referent, the date of publication of the texts, the syntactic relationship between possessor and possessed noun phrases, animacy, and type of possession. Overall, the findings suggest a functional specialization of the possessive forms seu and dele when comparing Classical Portuguese to modern Brazilian Portuguese. These results not only corroborate previous studies but also offer new analytical perspectives on the notion of linguistic prominence.