Insubordinate clauses in old Portuguese: preliminary notes

Abstract

Since Evans (2007), numerous investigations about clauses with subordinate form, but with syntactically independent functioning have been observed in different languages (EVANS; WATANABE, 2016). This phenomenon has been labeled as insubordination, although there are similar descriptions that adopt other nomenclatures. Evans’ (2007) pioneering study also reveals one of the most widespread hypotheses among scholars about origins of these structures, according to which insubordinate clauses are the result of a diachronic process in which the main clause is ellipsed and the subordinate clause is reanalyzed, preserving formal traces of syntactic dependence. Despite plausibility of this hypothesis, we found that most research on insubordination has examined only synchronic data, without effectively exploring a diachronic trajectory of change that evidenced the ellipse hypothesis. Thus, in this article, we investigate the existence of insubordinate clauses in Old Portuguese, examining documents dating from 14th century and extracted from Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval (CIPM). Our aim is to verify the diachronic hypothesis about the origin of insubordinates in Portuguese. This text has a preliminary character, since reported data are part of a broader project, in which we intend to diachronically map occurrences of insubordinate clauses in history of Portuguese, from 13th century to 21st century. Our first results provide evidence contrary to the ellipse hypothesis, since we found more than one pattern of insubordination in the historical text analyzed.