Uli Reich
3. Specificity and animacy as triggers of Brazilian pronouns
3.2 Specificity and Brazilian pronouns in the recent discussion
The first prominent contemporary work on the choice between free pronouns and zero anaphora in object position was Maria Eugênia Duartes sociolinguistic approach (1986). She highlights the effect of animacy: in her corpus, 92,4 % of free pronouns in object position had [+animate] antecedents (Duarte 1989, 24). We will see in section 3 that in contemporary, relaxed, spoken Portuguese in São Paulo, this is not a condition on the use of ele/ela.
Sonia Cyrino (1997) was the first to discuss the effects of specificity on the diachronic process of the loss of the third person object clitics. However, she did not consider these effects on the synchronic choice between the free pronoun and the null object in
7 Note that eu as an object still is restricted to very marked occasions, like imperatives in emotional styles: solta eu, deixa eu, etc.
8 Cf. the corpora in Reich 2002. It should also be noted that the relation of the ‚new pronouns’ with some verbs is marked by a preposition: ele te/nos liga v. ele liga pra você/pra gente. Purely configurational case marking is restricted to the ‚most directly transitive’ verbs as see, love, kiss, kill etc. The ‚new pronominal system’ also is not meant as the predictable goal of change in BP, rather as a structural possibility of spoken contemporary BP.
There is no reason to assume the loss of the clitic object pronouns for the deictic persons in the future.
Uli Reich 125 contemporary spoken BP and rather explained the null object within a theory of syntactic reconstruction without going much into the details of its variation with the free pronoun.
An effort to correlate specificity with the use of the free pronoun or the zero anaphora in object position was made later in a coauthored paper from the three Brazilian investigators who most contributed to the description and explanation of these phenomena: Sonia Cyrino, Maria Eugênia Duarte and Mary Kato. In Cyrino/Duarte/Kato (2000), the authors introduce what they call the ‘Implicational Mapping Hypothesis’, that regulates the distribution of empty and full pronouns in both of the core arguments, direct object and subject. BP is special within the iberoromance languages not only for its null objects and configurational pronoun system, but also for what has been called the loss of the pro-drop property: pronouns in subject positions are nearly obligatory:
(11) a. [+human, + specific]:
Quando ela acordou, ela estava em Hong Kong.
When sheawake3P-PERFshebe3P-PERF in Hong Kong
‘When she awoke, she was in Hong Kong’.
b. [+human, -specific]:
Se a criança não recebe uma alimentação eficaz, ela If DEF child not receive3P-PRES INDEF alimentation efficient, she
fica em desvantagem pro resto da vida.
stay3P-PRES PREP disadvantage PREP+DEFrest PREP+DEFlife
‘If the child isn’t properly fed, it is handicapped the rest of its life’.
c. [-human, +specific]:
Por que você não aprontou o almoçoi na hora? - Elei está pronto.
Why you not get ready DEF lunch in time It be3P-PRES ready
‘Why didn’t you get the meal ready on time? – It is ready’.
(Cyrino/Duarte/Kato 2000, 61-62) In the examples (11), no dependency on any semantic property of the antecedent can be observed: all discourse topics are continued with pronouns if they are in subject position.9
In order to account for both phenomena, the preference for null objects and for subject pronouns, Cyrino/Duarte/Kato (2000) put forward their hypothesis based on a referential hierarchy that resembles similar ones from Bossong or Silverstein:
9 A diachronic study on the rise of this obligatoriness maybe could shed some light on the question if pronouns were first used in the case of antecedent NPs with specific referents.
I. Referential Hierarchy
non-argument proposition [-human] [+human]
3rd p. 2nd p. 1st p.
-specific +specific
[-ref] [+ref]
II. The Implicational Mapping Hypothesis
a. The more referential, the greater the possibility of a non-null pronoun.
b. A null variant at a specific point on the scale implies null variants to its left in the referential
hierarchy. (Cyrino/Duarte/Kato 2000, 59)
As we will see in the following sections, the predictions made by the hypothesis seem to be widely corroborated by diachronic and synchronic facts in BP. If we discuss subject and object realizations separately, Spanish also confirms the predictions made by the Implicational Mapping Hypothesis: only objects with specific referents can have a coreferential clitic within the same sentence (cf. section 1). On the other hand, subject pronouns are realized in this ‘pro-drop language’ only for purposes of contrast or focus and referents that are highlighted in discourse and sentence structure appear to be ‘specific by nature’:
(12) Un estudiante ha engañado en la clase de sintaxis.
‘A student cheated in the syntax class.’
a. Él no sabe resolver las tareas, mientras los otros lo saben. [+spec]
He not know solve DEF exercises, while DEF others it know
‘He doesn’t know how to solve the exercises, while the others do know it.
b. Ø se ha aprovechado de reglas recursivas. [-spec]
c. * Él se ha aprovechado de reglas recursivas. [-spec]
Ø/He himself AUX take advantage-PART of rules recursive
‘He took advantage of recursive rules.’
Problems appear in two misleading theoretical assumptions about the nature of specificity and referentiality that can be deduced from the form of representation of this hierarchy. First, referentiality and specificity appear as poles of a continuum. Both semantic concepts, however, can only be understood as discrete and binary: a linguistic expression either is referential or it is not, just as it is either specific or not. Second, specificity seems to be correlated to the semantic feature [+/- human]. In linguistic reality, this is not the case.
Inanimated referents can be as specific as human referents, just as human referents can be as non-specific as inanimated referents. Note that Bossong put the two semantic properties into different dimensions, an ‘inherent’ one and a ‘referential’ one.10
In two recent papers, Scott Schwenter and Gláucia Silva (2002; forthcoming) explicitly investigate the effects of specificity and animacy on the two possibilities in BP and try to explain the choice in terms of Bossongs differential object marking.
10 Cf. section 2.1.
Uli Reich 127 They start with the observation that null objects are not possible for deictic persons, a claim that is not very surprising since the phonological process that omits the (sub)segmental clitics o/a does not affect the clitics for first and second person which prosodically are ‘optimal’
open syllables and, as deictic signs, have a completely different semantic status.
Schwenter and Silva then show very interesting effects of animacity, specificity and definiteness on the choice between free pronouns and null objects. Based on the judgments of five native speakers, they compare introspective examples that contrast in animacy, definiteness and specificity: 11
(13) [-anim, +spec, +def]:
Sabe a árvore grande que tinha na minha rua?
Know DEF tree big REL be-IMPERF in+INDEF my street A prefeitura derrubou Ø/?ela.
DEF City Hall knock down3P-PERF Ø/it.
‘You know the big tree that was on my street? City Hall knocked it down.’
(14) [-anim, +spec, -def]:
Na minha rua tem uma casa antiga linda, In+DEF my street be-PRES INDEF house old beautiful mas eles vão derrubar Ø/?ela.
but they FUT knock down Ø/it.
‘On my street there is a beautiful old house, but they’re going to knock it down.’
(13) and (14) show that definiteness plays no role in the choice between free pronouns and null objects. In both cases, the informants of Schwenter and Silva apparently prefer the null object. In (15), they test an antecedent with an animated referent, choosing in this case a pet dog, an animal that is supposed to be something between an animal and a human being. The preferred choice in these cases is the free pronoun:
(15) [+ anim, +spec, +def]:
O cachorroda Ana adora ir na rua.
DEF dog of+DEF Ana love3P-PRESgo in+DEF Ela sempre leva ?*Ø/ ele para passear.
She always take Ø/him PREP walk.
‘Ana’s dog loves to go out in the street. She always takes him for walks.’
(16) and (17) contrast specific with non-specific antecedents. For non-specific referents, the null object is preferred, while for specific referents the informants choose the free pronoun.
Note that specificity is marked by the subjunctive mood of the relative clause in (16):
11 Examples (13) to (17) are taken from Schwenter/Silva 2002. They are on pages 4-5 of the original manuscript that Scott Schwenter kindly sent me before its publication. The numeration follows that of the present paper.
(16) [+anim, -spec, -def]:
Eu estou procurando uma secretária que fale inglês, I be1P-PRES search-GERINDEF secretary REL speak3P-SUBJ English mas ainda não encontrei Ø/uma.
but yet not find1P-PERF Ø/one.
‘I am looking for a secretary that speaks English, but I haven’t found one yet.
(17) [+anim, +spec, +def]
Eu estou procurando uma secretária que fala inglês, I be1P-PRES search-GERINDEF secretary REL speak3P English mas ainda não encontrei ?*Ø/ela.
but yet not find1P-PERF Ø/one.
‘I am looking for a secretary that speaks English, but I haven’t found one yet.
Observing these examples, the authors conclude that
[...] null objects are permissible when the direct object referent is [-animate] or [-specific], or both.
The acceptability of an overt pronoun varies depending on these same features, but an overt pronoun appears to be required, or at least comes closest to being required, only when the direct object is both [+animate] and [+specific]. Animacy and specificity, then, work in tandem in BP to determine the
surface form of direct objects. (Schwenter/Silva 2002, 12)
Schwenter/Silva (forthcoming) basically corroborates this characterization quantitatively in the PEUL corpus of spoken portuguese in Rio de Janeiro, conducted in the early 1980s. The recordings consist of interviews that were guided by researchers from the Universidade de Rio de Janeiro. The authors counted 1250 occurences of anaphoric direct objects. The results confirm the characterization given above.
Table 2: Anaphoric direct objects in spoken Rio de Janeiro Portuguese
+anim/+spec +anim/-spec -anim/+spec -anim/-spec
Null 50 (24,4%) 102 (75,5%) 151 (87,3%) 604 (81,9%)
Pronoun 126 (61,5%) 12 (8,9%) 0 (0%) 13 (1,8%)
Full NP 29 (14,1%) 21 (15,6%) 22 (12,7%) 120 (13,3%)
Totals 205 (100%) 135 (100%) 173 (100%) 737 (100%)
(Schwenter/Silva forthcoming, 15)
We can see that animacy seems to be the decisive factor for the use of the free pronoun in this corpus. While the null object appears in every combination of the two semantic properties, the free pronoun is the preferred solution only for animated, specific referents. Thus, the authors basically come to the same results as Duarte (1986) concerning the importance of animacy.
3.3 Null objects and free object pronouns in contemporary spoken Portuguese of São