The accusative strategies of 2nd person in romantic personal letters from the Pernambuco: a study through the Historical Sociolinguistics

Abstract

This article is part of the recent studies on the history of Brazilian Portuguese from the perspective of Historical Sociolinguistics. Our aim is to analyze the accusatory strategies, based on the grammaticalization of ‘você' as second-person pronoun, in romantic personal letters exchanged between individuals from the sertão region in the 1950s. The initial questions that instigate the investigation are the following: i) how did ‘você’, in the accusative case function, get implemented in the second person paradigm? And how did the clitic ‘te' still resist as an accusative strategy in face of the third person paradigm forms? ii) Which morphosyntactic contexts favor the occurrence of alternating forms in the accusative case function in the post-verbal position? The previous researches carried out by Lopes et al. (2018), Gomes; Lopes (2014) and Ataíde and Lima (2018) complement the theoretical and methodological support offered by the Historical Sociolinguistics perspective as proposed by Conde Silvestre (2007) and the Discursive Tradition model developed by Kabatek (2006, 2012); Andrade; Gomes (2018) and Ataíde (2020). The results of the analysis point to the confirmation of the hypothesis of Lopes et al. (2018) regarding the resistance of the clitic 'te' in the accusative case function. With regard to the position of the clitic, we found that proclisis is the preferred position for the accusative to be placed by the missivists and that the contexts favoring the enclisis were the beginning of the sentence and when the accusative was the pronoun ‘você’.