Acerca da posição do adjetivo no sintagma nominal: variação e/ou mudança?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a contribution to the study of anteposition and postposition of adjectives in Portuguese noun phrases, based on private letters from 19th and 20th centuries, trying to take a step forward to the understanding of the level of productivity of anteposition of adjectives, making use of an informal written corpus. The letter writers are originally from two cities of Southern region of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais). Syntactic and semantic constraints and other variables such as each writer´s origin, associative proprieties and the hypothesis of the adjective position be previously marked on the lexical component are discussed. The analysis confirms preference for non-categorical postposition, low frequency of variable items, bearing in mind the fact that, over time, some adjectives lose/adquire the feature [+PN] (público instrumento “public instrument” – 19th century / instrumento público “instrument public”– 20th century and Supremo tribunal “supreme court” – 20th century instead of tribunal Supremo “court supreme” – 19th century),generally, in legal language crystalized expressions. The change and/or fixation of adjective position in noun phrase must be seen in a larger set of changes of Brazilian Portuguese.