Informational status and focus: its influence over subject position in BP

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss the relationship between subject informational status and its position in the sentence in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). For this purpose, we analyzed a group of personal letters which were written by Brazilians born in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, more specifically between 1800 and 1975, and which are part of the Corpus Histórico da Língua Portuguesa - Corpus Histling. Among the Generative theory framework, which is adopted here, several studies about word order in BP claim that it suffered changes concerning subject position, which lead to a grammar with fixed SV order and VS restricted to specific contexts, such as the inaccusative ones. This order had once suffered the influence of functional factors, as informational status. Taking this scenario into account, we analyze this change and test two hypothesis: (i) the fact of the subject being new is no longer the most important factor for subject postposition and; (ii) others grammatical strategies emerge to apply focus to the subject. Therefore, we present an analysis of the change in subject position and the elements that have impact on its position. These elements are both grammatical, as verb type, and discursive, as subject informational status, adopting Prince (1981). After this first moment, we analyze the consequences of such shift over focus strategies, based in the distinction of a subject which encodes new/old information and a subject which receives, or not, focus. Our results show that the informational status is not, currently, the main factor influencing VS order, but that it is relevant when associated with inaccusative verbs. Our results also show that, with VS restriction, cleft emerge as a strategy for focusing on the subject, but only when contrastiveness and exhaustivity are involved (ZUBIZARRETA, 1998; KISS, 1998).

Keywords:
Informational status; VS order; Clefts; Focus; Diachrony