Singularities in the syntax of brazilian portuguese written in the northeastern region in the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

In the disciplinary field of diachronic syntax, I present in this article a diatopic-diachronic mapping of the results of different studies of three morphosyntactic phenomena of Portuguese written in Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries: the implementation of the pronoun você as a subject; the expression of the dative complement with reference to the second person singular; and the syntax of placement and position of clitic personal pronouns in simple sentences and in complex predicates. This diatopic-diachronic mapping allows me to bring up arguments in favor of the hypothesis that in the vast Brazilian territory of the 19th and 20th centuries the innovative forms of Brazilian Portuguese grammar are implemented with more expressiveness, already in late 19th century writing, first in the Northeast when compared to the Southeast and South regions. In writing in the Brazilian Northeast of the 19th century there are reflections of a system already implemented with the pronoun você in the function of subject, with the pronoun lhe as a dative complement of the second person singular, with an expressive increase of the prepositional forms (a/para + te/tu/you), and with a system of clitics with few cases of interpolation and contraction of clitics pronouns and innovative forms with proclisis in initial position of the period.