Word Order in Colonial Brazilian Portuguese: Initial Findings

Abstract

Some recent studies have posed the hypothesis according to which the grammatical stage that precedes the cultured trend of Brazilian Portuguese is Colonial Brazilian Portuguese, not Classical Portuguese. Therefore, there are still few works systematically comparing these two varieties. This is the goal of the present paper, which focuses on word order. By undertaking a corpus-based study using the same textual genre from the contemporary authors Eusébio de Matos and António Vieira, we have looked for all word order patterns while paying special attention to the X*VS order (with one or more constituents preceding the verb and a postverbal subject), given that it is quite typical of Classical Portuguese as a V2-like grammar, unlike the modern Portuguese grammars. We have observed that, although the colonial text follows the general trends of the classical language, it starts to depart from a V2-like grammar because it shows a higher frequency of non-V2 orders and a preference for informationally marked constructions involving internal positions to the clause. From a parameter hierarchy viewpoint, the main conclusion is that such differences represent frequency divergences which are consistent with nano- or microparametric changes which took place later.