O vocativo no português brasileiro nos séculos XIX e XX: um estudo de mudança lingüística

Abstract

The present study aims to research the vocative in constructions of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) from the 19th and the 20th centuries. We attempt to describe, justify and analyze the conditions under which this phrase occurs in the sentences, using to achieve that propose a theoretical frame that reconciles the Theory of Variation and Linguistic Change (Weinreich, Labov e Herzog (1968) and Labov (1972, 1982, 1994)) and version of Principles and Parameters form the Generative Grammar (Tarallo & Kato, 1989) Kroch (1989), Ramos (1992), Chomsky, (1995, 2005)). Since there is a remarkable lack of studies concerning the vocative, the general aim of this dissertation is to expand the existing knowledge on this matter. Our hypothesis is that this is a change process in Brazilian Portuguese involving the positions of placing the vocative in the sentence, namely, [Voc + Clause], [Clause + Voc] and [Clause + Voc + Clause]. Our study subject is therefore the syntactic behavior of this phrase in the sentence. The corpus used consists of dialogues from plays written by Brazilian authors in the 19th and the 20th centuries. This choice is due to the fact that the selected dialoguesrepresent the characters speech. It was noticed a change concerning a variety of positions of placing the vocative in the sentence. It was found that the order [Clause + Voc] presents an upward profile, with the highest occurrence rate in the second half of the 20th century. This profile isillustrated by a curve in S and, therefore, it is an indicative of linguistic change. Once identified the preference for a new order, we collected evidence for the Constant Rate Effect (Kroch, 1989).The description of the syntactic structure in which the vocative is inserted was made from the comparison of this phrasess syntactic behavior with the behavior of others (focus, topic and dislocated constituents). According to our hypothesis, the vocative is generated in the region called by Rizzi (1997) as the left periphery of the sentence; it may also be moved within that region (for the category Foc P).