Syntactic variation in sixteenth-century Portuguese: the position of clitic pronouns
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Abstract
This work reexamines in the light of new data a proposal put forward in Martins (2011) concerning the historical development of clitic placement in Portuguese. Prima facie, this syntactic change follows a surprising path apparently involving a sudden reversal in the direction of change after the sixteenth century. It is argued in this paper that previous analyses, including that of the present author, fail to recognise the existence in sixteenth century and later Portuguese of two (social) dialects as regards the position of clitic pronouns. A simplistic observation of textual sources masks the complexity of the linguistic situation in the historical period in question, creating an illusion of continuity between different objects. The present study uses the sixteenth century cookbook Livro de Cozinha de um Frade Português do Século XVI, edited by Anabela Leal de Barros (2013), as an especially valuable textual source to help us understand the history of clitic placement in Portuguese.
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