The Survival of the First Person Dative Pronoun in the (Almost) Lost Battle of Pronominal Clitics of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The study investigates the pronominal split in the expression of datives in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which consists in the use of first and second person clitics, as opposed to the third person strong pronoun in the complement position of the dative preposition (para ele(s)/ ela(s)), with the loss of the third person dative clitics (lhe(s)). The analysis argues in favor of the survival of the first person clitic me in view of its wide syntactic distribution, in ditransitive predicates, dynamic and stative, in monotransitive predicates, inergative and inaccustative, incluind psychological verbs, and in predicates expressing the ethical datives. Assuming an approach of the pronominal split in terms of an interpretable person feature in the applicative heads (cf. TORRES MORAIS; SALLES, 2010, 2019), we propose that a microparametric change in the values of the person feature, from a bivalent system to a monovalent one, causes that the syntactic and semantic properties of the dative clitic me be unified as a High Applicative head, in Pylkkänen’s (2002, 2008) typology.