Semantic animacy constraints of the Brazilian Portuguese null object

Abstract

With this paper, we aim to make some reflections on the Brazilian Portuguese null object and its semantic animacy constraints. Many synchronic and diachronic, formalist and variationist works (GALVES, 1984; DUARTE, 1989; CYRINO, 1994, SOLEDADE, 2011; PEIXOTO, 2021) attest that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a language that allows null object with virtually no restrictions. This means that it can occur in several syntactic structures – coordination and subordination (relative, adverbial) – and with several types of antecedent/referent: [+/− animate, +/− specific], preferably being [− animate]. However, one type of configuration weakens the possibility of null object in BP, although it is still possible: when its antecedent is [+ excited, + specific]. Several generativist authors have proposed interpretations for this fact, relating it to different natures of the null category. In this paper, based on a corpus of private personal letters written by Brazilians born during the twentieth century, based on the results of Peixoto (2021), we bring some of these discussions and results of quantitative data analysis about the null object in BP and its relations with the animacy of its referent, showing that the null object constraint is not strictly syntactic in nature, but semantic, what Galves (2001) calls a logoforicity constraint.