Variable Object Clitic Placement: Evidence from European and Brazilian Portuguese
Variable Object Clitic Placement: Evidence from European and Brazilian Portuguese Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Hannah Beth Washington Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese The Ohio State University 2015 Dissertation Committee: Professor Scott A. Schwenter, Advisor Professor Janice M. Aski Professor Terrell A. Morgan Copyright by Hannah Beth Washington 2015 ABSTRACT Variation in object clitic placement in Ibero-Romance has been of great interest to researchers working on Spanish and Portuguese (cf. Davies 1995, Davies 1997, Andrade 2010a, Andrade 2010b, Andrade 2010c, Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos 2010, Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos 2014a, Barnes, González López & Schwenter 2014, inter alia). Among these, European Portuguese (EP) alone displays generalized postverbal pronominal object clitic placement, with preverbal placement licensed in the presence of proclisis triggers. These triggers include negation, subordinating conjunctions, quantifiers, WH operators, and certain adverbs (Barrie 2000, Cunha & Cintra 2002, Perini 2002, inter alia). However, these normatively proclisis environments are loci of considerable variation in clitic placement, as seen below in (1) and (2). (1) Não o podia ter esquecido. [UHPVC-Simões] She couldn’t have forgotten him. (2) Não podia deixá-lo assim, morto e esquecido de todos. [ANT-Carvalho] She couldn’t leave him like that, dead and forgotten by everyone. Brazilian Portuguese (BP), on the other hand, is a predominantly proclitic variety with variation largely related to the form of the object clitic (Simões 2006), possibly influenced by the same proclisis triggers affecting EP (cf. Cunha & Cintra 2002, Perini ii 2002).
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