Arbitrary and generic subjects in the diachrony os Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The aim of this work is to verify the strategies of subject indeterminacy in Brazilian Portuguese diachronically, distinguishing between those of arbitrary reference and those of generic reference, according to the proposals of Marins, Soares da Silva and Duarte (2017) and Holmberg and Phimsawat (2017). The proposals allow the strategies to be distribute into three groups, which makes it possible to analyze those that are in fact in variation: (i) eles, se_arb and zero_arb (arbitrary – reference excludes the speaker and the addressee); (ii) nós and a gente (generic semi-inclusive – includes the speaker, but not necessarily the addressee); and (iii) você, se_gen and zero_gen (generic inclusive – includes the speaker and the addressee). We expect to attest to the implementation of innovative strategies over time in a sample of personal letters from the 19th and 20th centuries and an increase of the full representation of pronominal strategies.