Anaphoric Direct Objects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese: Semantics and pragmatics

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is unique among Romance languages in that it allows null direct objects where other Romance varieties require clitic pronouns, as in Eu comprei (slashed o) ontem, 'I bought (it) yesterday' (cf. Spanish Lo / *(slashed o) compre ayer). This paper presents quantitative corroboration of a prior qualitative semantic/pragmatic analysis of BP anaphoric direct objects, through the analysis of corpus data from spoken BP. We demonstrate that the semantic/pragmatic dimensions of animacy & specificity, & in particular their interaction with each other, must be taken into consideration to fully account for the variable form of anaphoric direct objects in BP. Only those anaphoric direct objects whose referents are both [+animate] & [+specific] tend toward overt pronominal realization; all other classes are overwhelmingly realized as null objects. This & other relevant findings permit us to situate BP direct objects in a broader cross-linguistic perspective. We demonstrate that the tendencies observable in the coding of anaphoric direct objects in BP are motivated by factors that closely resemble those regulating differential object marking phenomena in languages like Spanish. Thus, despite clear formal differences between BP & other languages in the realization of direct objects, the underlying semantic/pragmatic motivations for differential surface patterns across languages exhibit striking similarities. 6 Tables, 3 Figures, 45 References. Adapted from the source document