A retomada anafórica por pronome clítico acusativo de terceira pessoa no português brasileiro

Abstract

This work aims to verify and describe the occurrences of third person anaphoric clitics in Brazilian Portuguese considering their semantic (definiteness, animacity and specificity) and morphosyntactic (verbal mood, tense and clitic positioning) contexts. First, we approach the phenomenon by showing the theoretical background that contributes to our analysis. We also discuss the work of other authors with respect to other kinds of anaphora in Brazilian Portuguese and the features analyze in this research. The present work departs from the hypothesis that the different kinds of third person anaphora are distributed according to the definiteness and specificity of their antecedents, as already observed in the literature (CERQUEIRA, 2015; OTHERO E SPINELLI, 2017; CARVALHO, 2008). We observed the behavior of the anaphoric clitics with respect to these features. The data was collected from social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). A quantitative analysis was held to verify whether the semantic and morphosyntactic features bear a significative correlation with the occurrence of clitics versus the other strategies. The analysis showed that while clitics are not sensitive to the semantic features of their antecedents, they tend to occur more often attached to infinitives.