Strong pronouns and clitic pronouns in brazilian portuguese and french

Abstract

Clitic pronouns generally correspond to verbal arguments and depend on a verbal base to support them, which is one of the reasons why they cannot occur as isolated elements in a sentence, contrary to what can be verified for strong pronouns and DPs and PPs. Still in relation to these elements, which can also represent verbal arguments, pronominal clitics present other syntactic behaviors of their own, such as the impossibility of moving to a topic position. Considering the clitic pronouns, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) presents divergences from the traditional grammar, which takes the European variety of the language as a norm; one of these differences is the loss of third-person accusative clitic pronouns, which no longer belong to the Brazilian speaker’s I-language. In French, however, third-person pronominal clitics are very productive, regardless of the syntactic case considered. Also unlike BP, French has nominative, locative and partitive/genitive pronominal clitics. Furthermore, even in spoken language, clusters of clitic pronouns are used in French, which is not the case in BP. All these differences may represent difficulties for Brazilians to acquire French.
KEYWORDS: Clitic pronouns. Brazilian Portuguese. French.