Subject-Verb agreement in 19th century Brazilian Portuguese

an analysis in letters from Bahian Sertão

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical embeddedness of the variation of third person plural clause agreement in 19th century Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on a corpus of 101 letters written by 16 senders and addressed to Cícero Dantas Martins, Baron of Jeremoabo, in the sertões of Bahia. For the discussion and analysis, the fac-simile and semi-diplomatic editions edited by Carneiro (2005) were used. Although the variation of third person plural clause agreement has been exhaustively studied in contemporary BP data, addressing this linguistic phenomenon from a historical perspective is still a challenge to the researcher, given the limitations imposed by the nature of the corpora that allow investigating previous phases of the language. The present work is based on the theoretical and methodological principles of Historical Sociolinguistics (ROMAINE, 1982; CONDE SILVESTRE, 2007; HERNANDEZ-CAMPOY; CONDE-SILVESTRE, 2012), in order to observe the linguistic and social variables that influence the presence/ absence of explicit plural marks in third-person verbal forms. Data point to the influence of the independent variables subject position in relation to the verb and phonetic salience in the application of the variable rule of third-person plural verbal agreement in the analysed corpus. Overall, the study opens ways for a better understanding and discussion of the historical process of verb agreement variation, the "touchstone" of Brazilian Portuguese, in the direction of making better use of "limited" and fragmentary data.