Overt vs. Null Direct Objects in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese: A Semantic/Pragmatic Account

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is unique among Romance languages in that it allows null direct objects where other Romance varieties would require at least a clitic pronoun. Although the correct syntactic analysis of null objects in BP has been debated extensively, there has been virtually no discussion of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. This paper examines the semantic/pragmatic constraints on null objects in spoken BP in detail, and situates BP null objects in the broader cross-linguistic perspective of differential object marking. We demonstrate that the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of animacy and specificity, and in particular their interaction, must be taken into consideration to fully account for the form of direct objects in BP. We also argue that, despite clear formal differences in how BP treats direct objects on the surface and their treatment in other languages (including other Romance varieties), the underlying semantic/pragmatic motivations for these differential surface patterns across languages are extremely similar.