Diachronic Studies on Information Structure / Language, Context and Cognition Bd.10 (PDF)

Prosody, Information Structure and Word Order Changes in Portuguese (p. 143-144)


Kristine Gunn Eide (Oslo)


1 Introduction


At the end of the 18th century, Portuguese lost many of its verb second characteristics and went from being what seemed like a verb second language to an SVO language. In this paper it is argued that a syntactic change that took place from Classical Portuguese (16th – 18th cent), henceforth ClP, to Modern European Portuguese (18th -20th cent.), henceforth EP, originated in a change in the discourse pattern that may itself have been prosodically driven. The syntactic change in question is a fixing of the subjects in preverbal position. Preverbal subjects go from being exclusively topics, and old information, to occurring in non-topic contexts as well.

Following Galves and Galves (1995) and Galves et al. (2005), I assume that the position of the clitics in ClP was phonologically or prosodically determined and that they would occur after specific prosodic patterns. When the position of the clitics changed around the 2nd half of the 17th century, it was the result of a change in the prosodic pattern. I shall argue that the weakening of sentence-initial prosodic prominence opened up for non-topic subjects to occur preverbally. The observable change in syntax, a reanalysis of TVX (Topic – Verb – Other constituents) to SVO (Subject – Verb – Object) was only possible after the non-topic subjects started to appear before the verb. The reanalysis affected the surface structure of unaccusative verbs in particular because the subjects of these verbs are generated in post verbal position. The change in the syntax is dependent on the previous change in the prosody and information structure.

In section 2 of this paper is a short outline of the problems regarding a V2 analysis of ClP. I describe the word order in ClP and show that while a verb second analysis can

Gisella Ferraresi, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M., Germany; Rosemarie Lühr, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany.