O sujeito pronominal nas tiras da Mafalda: uma análise contrastiva do sujeito nulo nas gramáticas do português brasileiro e do italiano

Abstract

Proof of the sundering of Portuguese as spoken in Brazil and Portugal has been the subject of several investigations, which point out that Brazilian Portuguese displays a particular Null Subject behavior. This behavior is presumably due to a reduction of inflected forms in the inflectional paradigm that has led BP to phonetically express pronouns. Accordingly, this paper means to analyze the behavior of subject pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese by comparing it with Italian - the null subject language by excellence in order to confirm those structures which set them apart as well as those which still allow for licensing null pronouns as subjects. To achieve this we have used the Theory of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1981) as a procedural and theoretical basis in association with theoretical-methodological principles from the Variationist Theory (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968), since this association has been proven satisfactory for collecting and analyzing data. The sources for our corpora were structurally similar sentences in Brazilian Portuguese and Italian found in the fictional character Mafalda s comics. The high rates of Nulls found in the Italian version confirms the distance between it and BP. On the other hand, the syntactic structures of Complementizer Phrases have proven themselves to be significant factors not only for BP but for Italian as well