The cartography of personal resumptive pronouns of the Brazilian Portuguese’s subject doubling construction: a synchronic proposal

Abstract

This article articulates a cartographic and synchronic proposal to the Brazilian Portuguese’s (PB) sentences formed by a preverbal subject duplicated by a resumptive personal pronoun (SD). It is understood by academic writing on the theme that, in this language, the initial phrase of these sentences is not necessarily topicalized; it might occupy a position within the argumental domain. It is assumed, in accordance with Quarezemin (2019, 2020) and Krieck (2022), that these non-topicalized phrases can fill Spec, SubjP, as default sentence subjects. Under this supposition, it is expected that the resumptive pronoun manifests heterogeneous behavior across the variety of SD sentences in PB, depending on the position occupied by the initial phrase and other grammatical conditions involved. The singularities that characterize the resumptive pronouns allow these items to be categorized as follows, under the Cardinaletti & Starke’s (1994) pronominal tripartion: strong or weak ones, when the initial DP is a topic, and clitic or weak ones, when this element occupies a position within IP. On this assumption, this analysis proposes that the category of the resumptive item defines the position it occupies in structure, so that: (i) strong resumptive pronouns occupy Spec, SubjP and very narrowly a position inside CP domain; (ii) clitic resumptive pronouns occupy Subj°; and (iii) weak resumptive pronouns is at Spec, TP. Based on this examination, the different processes of structural formation that underlie these sentences’ production are also described.