The Change in Clitic Placement from Classical to Modern European Portuguese: Results from the Tycho Brahe Corpus

Abstract

In this paper we study the syntax of clitic-placement in Portuguese authors born from 1542 to 1836, as regards their patterns of clitic pronouns placement. The motivation for the research was to enquire: what is the pattern of enclisis (V-cl) and proclisis (cl-V) variation in those texts; is it indicative of linguistic change; if so, when in the timeline can the change be located? Drawing from the emprical results, we analyse the syntax of clitic placement in those texts as representative of a grammatical change which should be located in the first half of the 18th century. Our empirical arguments and structural analysis sustain that in texts up to the 18th century, enclisis is strictly a Verb-First phenomenon (even so, we will argue, in constructions that are supperficially non-verb initial). We sustain that the effects of this syntax in clitic placement ceases to be noticed for texts written by authors born after 1700