Pronominal clitics in restrictive relative constructions in written portuguese in Mozambique

Abstract

Based on the findings of Gonçalves (1996), Mapasse (2005), César (2014) and Wache (2018), who state that, in Mozambican Portuguese (PM), there is a tendency, in relativization constructions, for the accommodation of pronominal clitics in the enclitic position, this article seeks to explore the contexts of the occurrence of proclisis and enclisis in restrictive relative constructions (RR) in PM. The corpus of Wache (2023) was used, which consists of 815 relative phrases, of which 112 occur with clitic pronouns. The analysis of quantitative data was carried out with the help of an Excel spreadsheet that contained independent linguistic and extralinguistic variables. The results reveal that both in RRs that occur with a verb and in those that occur with verbal periphrasis, proclisis is predominant in PM, which demonstrates the conservation of cultured European Portuguese (EP) in this type of phrases. Enclisis in RR in PM is not entirely foreign to PE, since it occurs in similar contexts. The data in our possession indicate that there is no plausible evidence that demonstrates that enclisis in RR tends to be the standard in this developing variety.