Parametric change in the grammatical encoding of indirect objects in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper examines the syntax of indirect objects (IO) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Adopting a comparative perspective we propose that BP differs from European Portuguese (EP) in the grammatical encoding of IO. In EP ditransitive contexts, IO is found in two configurations – one projected by a (low) applicative head and another one involving a lexical/true preposition. We propose that the former property is contingent upon the presence of dative Case marking: namely, the morpheme ‘a’ that introduces IO (a-DP), whose corresponding clitic pronoun is ‘lhe/lhes’. In contrast, important changes in the pronominal system, coupled with the increase in the use of the preposition ‘para’ are taken as evidence for the loss of the low applicative construction in BP. Thus only the configuration with the lexical/true preposition is found in (Standard) BP. We argue that the innovative properties of IO in BP are due to the loss of the (3rd person) dative clitic and the preposition ‘a’ as dative Case markers. Under this view, we further account for the realization of IO as a DP/weak pronoun, found in dialects of the central region of Brazil, which points to a similarity with the English Double Object Construction. Finally we show that the connection between the morphological expression of the dative Case and the expression of parameters supports a view of syntactic change according to which parametric variation is determined in the lexicon, in terms of the formal features of functional heads.