A relação entre a colocação dos clíticos e o parâmetro pro-drop no português brasileiro

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to discuss the relationship between the clitics and the prodrop parameter in sentences with indeterminate subjects, with the inacusative verb to seem and with imperative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). For this it makes use of the theoretical framework outlined by Chomsky (1981), Rizzi (1986) and Raposo(1992), which postulates the existence of a Universal Grammar, and according to which the language faculty was divided into two parts. On one side were the principles which are universal and constant, and are responsible for similarities between languages. On the other side were the parameters, that although also universal, have a value that changes from language to language, which would explain the difference betweenthem. The research was motivated initially by the realization that, as has been reported by Holmberg (2000) about the scandinavian languages, with respect to the operation named Stilistic Fronting, the subject position in BP has been increasingly filled by XP's moved to that position, or inserted in it in order to check the feature EPP, which, according Chomsky (1998), requires that the position of Spec-TP (Spec-IP) is filled bya category. Thus, the satisfaction of EPP, according to Holmberg (op.cit.) Can occur in several ways: by movement of a theta-DP; by inserting an expletive XP; for clitic pronouns; or even for agreement affixes in T°. The main hypothesis of this study is that pronominal clitics, especially first-person "me", move to subject position when it is empty, including occasioning the order (cl +V) in absolute beginning of the sentence,countering European Portuguese data evidencing an characteristic of PB. Preliminary surveys realize that whenever the pronominal clitic is present in a context of indeterminate subject, there is the exclusion of the nominative pronoun, which reinforces the idea that the clitic occupies the position of the excluded nominative pronoun within the structure of this sentence.