Contexts for null subjects in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Null subjects have been extensively investigated in natural languages. Brazilian Portuguese (BP), in particular, raises a lot of interest in the subject, for it is apparently in a process of grammatical change, from a pro-drop language to a partial pro-drop language (cf. BIBERAUER et al., 2010; HOLMBERG et al., 2009; DUARTE; MARINS, 2021; SOARES et al., 2019). In this article, we investigate null subjects in BP assuming that null referential subjects are only used in ‘marked’, specific contexts, whereas overt subjects are the ‘unmarked’, more frequent strategy. We have analyzed a contemporary corpus of spoken BP and found 1,252 occurrences of null subjects. We then present four factors that are traditionally known for playing a role in determining the optimal contexts for null subjects in BP (and several other languages). We argue here that all these four factors are both necessary and sufficient to explain all null subject occurrences in any given corpus of contemporary spoken BP. We analyzed all the 1,252 occurrences of null subjects in the corpus and could explain 99.8% of the data, leading us to a better understanding of the null subject phenomenon in BP, at least when it comes to identifying its licensing contexts.