“Se aparecer noticias serias ahi, escreva-me”: subject-verb agreement in letters from the 19th century bahian sertão

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical fit of third person plural clause variation in 19th century Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on a corpus of 190 letters written by 43 senders and addressed to Cícero Dantas Martins, the Baron of Jeremoabo. Although the variation in third person plural clause agreement has been exhaustively studied in contemporary BP data, dealing with this linguistic phenomenon from a historical perspective is still a challenge for researchers, given the limitations imposed by the nature of the corpora that allow investigating previous phases of the language. In addition to these limitations, the present discussion is based on the theoretical and methodological principles of Historical Sociolinguistics (ROMAINE, 1982), in dialogue with Historical Linguistics and Philology, seeking to reflect on the linguistic and social factors that condition the variable presence/absence of explicit plural marks in third-person verb forms. By submitting the variables to the GoldVarb X Program, one can see the conditioning of the position of the subject in relation to the verb, the semantic characterization of the subject, the type of verb, and phonic salience in the application of the agreement rule. As for the social variables, only a qualitative analysis made it possible to discuss the influence of the social variables on the object under study, given the limitations imposed by the nature of the documentation used as corpus. In general, this opens the way to a better understanding of the historical process of variation in verbal agreement, the “cornerstone” of Brazilian Portuguese, in order to make better use of “limited” and fragmentary data.