Colloquium: Scott Schwenter: "Gradience and contrast in 2SG direct object pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese)

Gradience and contrast in 2SG direct object pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese

(Joint research with Bland, Dickinson, Hoff, and Lamberti)

 

We examine the alternation in Brazilian Portuguese 2SG direct object (DO) pronoun expression between clitic te 'you' and tonic você 'you' (e.g. Eu te vi ontem vs. Eu vi você ontem both meaning 'I saw you yesterday') using data from an online forced-choice survey completed by 146 native-speaker respondents. Results of mixed-effects logistic regressions show that dialectal subject pronoun preference (tu vs. você) and contrast both play a significant role in conditioning this choice. While te is preferred overall- a preference stronger among users of tu as subject- você is the variant preferred in contrastive contexts. In double contrast contexts, where both the target DO referent and the predicate are contrastive, você is even more strongly preferred. Thus contrast, despite its traditional treatment as binary, shows gradient effects on pronoun choice- the stronger the contrast, the greater the likelihood of você selection. Ultimately, we argue that what counts as the “unmarked” 2SG DO pronoun in BP is context-dependent and can only be determined taking type of contrast and speakers’ subject pronoun preferences into account. Our findings have important additional implications for the well-known distinction in Romance languages between "strong", "weak", and "clitic" pronouns, showing, in particular, that these contrasts are not discrete, but rather gradient categories with clear probabilistic tendencies.

 

Scott Schwenter is a variationist sociolinguist and pragmaticist at The Ohio State University, working on grammatical issues in both Spanish and Portuguese, including comparative aspects of the two languages. His work is corpus-based, and features multivariate statistical analysis of broad-scale patterns across different varieties of Spanish and Portuguese.

Dr. Schwenter is primarily interested in the contextual conditioning of linguistic variables, and why speakers choose to express things in a given way when they are faced with multiple options for conveying the same content. His most recent work has focused on the pronominal systems of both Spanish and Portuguese and also on negation in Romance languages more generally.