O processo de difusão da mudança na posição de clíticos de 3a pessoa na história do português

Abstract

In the present study, the position of clitics of 3rd person in the history of Portuguese Language was investigated, with emphasis on the issue of diffusion. It was intended to evaluate whether the diffusion of the change was sensitive to two factors: a formal and a functional one. From a theoretical point of view, this study was based on the variationist model and on the concept of syntactic diffusion. The corpus was made up of data extracted from texts from the 16th to 21st century, in the textual genre of chronicle. Two hypotheses were tested, which were confirmed: (a) the changes in the position of clitics of 3rd person started in the forms with the least formal salience; and (b) these changes started in the function of pronominal particle. It was further argued that Brazilian Portuguese did not maintain the patterns of classical Portuguese, since it has advanced more intensely in the process of preference for proclisis until the 18th century, with a higher frequency than of the 16th century.