Proclisis in initial context: syntactic Brazilianism or Lusitanian heritage?

Abstract

Proclisis in the initial context, common in Brazilian speech and absent from contemporary European Portuguese (Vieira, 2002; Biazolli, 2019), is usually considered a syntactic Brazilianism (Coutinho, 1976). This study investigates pronoun placement in the work Os Lusíadas, representative of Classical Portuguese, with the aim of demonstrating that proclisis in this context is not a Brazilianism, but rather an inheritance from the variety of Portuguese brought by the colonizers. As a theoretical framework, the perspective of linguistic drift (Naro; Scherre, 2003, 2007) is adopted, according to which many of the alleged morphosyntactic characteristics of the Brazilian variety are not the result of contact between languages, but phenomena that already existed in Portugal, which were expanded in the process of nativization of the Portuguese language in Brazil. The data were analyzed using the theoretical-methodological framework of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]). The results revealed that proclisis in the initial context was in variation with enclisis and was not an innovation of the Brazilian Portuguese. Therefore, this study provides support for understanding the origin of morphosyntactic features of the Brazilian variety by approaching grammatical phenomena from a historical perspective, in order to deconstruct myths inspired by the standard norm, which gives prestige to the Lusitanian variety.