A língua vinda d’além-mar: edição, estudo paleográfico-diplomático de manuscritos de portugueses no Brasil colonial e descrição da colocação de clíticos

Abstract

This PhD dissertation investigates the placement of clitic pronouns in finite clauses, both with simple verb forms and verbal groups, within corpora composed of documents written in Colonial Brazil by Portuguese from diverse social strata. The study is grounded in the principles of Historical Linguistics from a socio-historical perspective (Mattos e Silva, 2008), and it revisits the observation made by Ivo Castro (1996), who argued that understanding the reality of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) requires identifying "the type of Portuguese that was effectively brought on the caravels" (Castro, 1996, p. 4). According to Ribeiro (2015 [1998]), this entails determining which variety of Portuguese served as the basis for the eventual emergence of BP after undergoing transformations in Brazil. The research corpora comprise 233 autograph and apograph documents, organized into two sets: i. the Coleção Documental de Portugueses no Brasil Colônia, consisting of facsimiles of individual documents retrieved from archival databases, previously unedited or untreated, and thus submitted to semi-diplomatic editing and non-exhaustive paleographic-diplomatic analysis; ii. documents previously edited by other scholars (Barbosa, 1999; Marcotulio, 2008; CLUL, 2014), made available with textual treatments deemed appropriate for linguistic research, and edited conservatively and reliably. Findings from the simple verb constructions show that clitic placement patterns in samples of Portuguese written in Brazil align with those found in contemporaneous Portuguese writings from Europe — especially in clause-initial verb contexts and environments requiring obligatory proclisis. In variable contexts, similarities with European Portuguese were noted particularly in main clauses where the verb is preceded by neutral elements. In contrast, proclisis predominates in coordinated second clauses and especially in main clauses preceded by subordinate clauses, across nearly all verb tenses. Additionally, a more significant rise in enclisis is observed between the late 18th and early 19th centuries in texts written by these Portuguese immigrants. It is noteworthy that social stratification and the geographic origin of the scriptor did not significantly influence clitic placement. In verbal group constructions, proclisis to the first verb overwhelmingly predominates. Ultimately, the data reveal that between the mid-16th and 18th centuries, clitic placement patterns reflect Classical Portuguese (PCl), whereas in the 19th century, patterns of both PCl and contemporary European Portuguese (EP) coexisted.