Adjective position in letters and narratives in European Portuguese during the 17th-19th centuries

Abstract

This case-study analyzes the syntax of adnominal adjectives in 17th-19th century European Portuguese diachronically. We utilize syntactically and morphologically annotated data from the Tycho Brahe Project’s Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese. A total of five letters and four narratives written by authors born between the 17th and 19th centuries were analyzed. They yielded 7,996 valid DPs after manual verification of the data. Our hypothesis was that the shift in the preferential position of evaluative adjectives (from anteposition to postposition) would be observed first in text genres closer to orality, such as letters, and that such shift has not taken place in the same way for definite and indefinite DPs. The results confirm that there is a difference in the behavior of adjectives when we look at different text genres and determiners. We also provide a qualitative analysis of two letters, one from the 17th century and another from the 19th century, in order to investigate the concomitant effect of determiner types, adjective types, and noun types. The results show a preference for the anteposition of evaluative adjectives with definite determiners and with names [+human], but a preference for postposition with indefinite determiners and names [+human], in both the 17th and 19th centuries. In addition, the use of non-evaluative adjectives increased from the 17th to the 19th century, disproportionately favoring postposition.