O terceiro volume da Gramática do português culto falado no Brasil é o resultado dos estudos linguísticos do Subprojeto "Relações gramaticais no português brasileiro falado" (RGPBF), inicialmente coordenado pelos Profs. Drs. Fernando Tarallo e Mary Kato (UNICAMP) e continuado após a morte do Prof. Tarallo pela Prof a. Mary Kato com a colaboração dos Profs. Drs. Charlotte Galves (UNICAMP) e Milton do Nascimento (UFMG) e inúmeros alunos, hoje professores das melhores universidades do país. O terceiro volume, que descreve os fenômenos sintáticos do português brasileiro (PB) a partir de dados coletados do corpus compartilhado do Projeto NURC, foi organizado por parte dos pesquisadores do RGPBF, com a colaboração de outros, que se juntaram ao projeto na fase de consolidação dos resultados. A priori, a publicação destina-se a um leitor "não-especialista em linguística formal, mas aberto a inovações conceituais, terminológicas e técnicas, que fogem aos usos convencionais da gramática tradicional." (pp. 2). Outro aspecto é que o livro não apresenta caráter normativo, mas descritivo. Assim, o leitor encontrará um elenco dos usos que, de fato, compõem o inventário da variedade culta do PB, mas não um conjunto de regras do bem falar e do bem escrever. Os organizadores deixam claro que partem de dados produzidos pelos falantes (ou seja, dados da Língua-E) para propor generalizações sobre os mecanismos subjacentes a esses enunciados: a Língua-I (Chomsky, 1986). O volume está organizado em seis capítulos: o primeiro, A arquitetura da gramática, traz um breve percurso dos estudos gramaticais, desde a Grécia antiga até as concepções de Chomsky sobre a estrutura interna da COR_PR3_delta_27-2_miolo.indd 363 COR_PR3_delta_27-2_miolo.indd 363

The aim of this article is twofold. In the first place, we present evidence that the syntactic change towards overt pronominal subjects observed in Brazilian Portuguese is not a stable phenomenon; rather, our empirical results allow to follow the parametric change in course and to identify the progressive loss of crucial properties related to ‘consistent’ null subject languages. The contrastive analysis with European Portuguese shows the stronger and the weaker structural contexts in this continuous battle towards the implementation of overt pronouns. Personal sentences (with definite and ‘indefinite’ – arbitrary and generic – subjects, usually referred as “impersonal”) are analyzed in more detail than those we consider impersonal sentences, which include a variety of structures, with climate, existential and unaccusative verbs, . They are, however, shown to have been deeply affected by the re-setting of the value of the Null Subject Parameter. Then, we will briefly compare Brazilian Portuguese with Finnish null subjects to conclude that Brazilian Portuguese does not seem to fit the group of the so called ‘partial’ null subject languages, which seem to exhibit null subjects in very restricted contexts, have a lexical expletive in apparent variation with null and generic subjects as well as in impersonal sentences, when it seems to be merged to avoid a verb-initial sentence.

Recent studies on the representation of pronominal subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) show the preference for overt indeterminate referential subjects. A "side effect" of the change in the Null Subject Parameter in BP is the progressive decline in the use of the standard strategies -structures with verb in the third person plural with a null subject and sentences with the pronominal generic clitic se -and the appearance of alternative strategies -an increasing frequency of sentences with overt nominative pronouns, especially você (you) and a gente (the people =we). Our purpose is to refine data of indeterminate subjects, collected from a sample of the speech of graduates from Rio de Janeiro.Our theoretical framework associates the Theory of Language Variation and Change (WLH, 2006(WLH, [1968)with the Principles and Parameters Theory (CHOMSKY, 1981(CHOMSKY, , 1995, which guides our analysis, from the hypotheses raised to the interpretation of the empirical data . Our results show that the different strategies are not in direct competition: they can be distributed in three diferent groups, according to a set of features they share, with respect to arbitrary and generic reference. At one extreme we find [+3rd person/+plural] category, which excludes the speaker, represented by the dying arbitrary clitic se and the pronoun eles (they), preferably overt. At the other extreme, we have a [+3rd person/+singular] category, which may or may not include the speaker and the addressee, represented by the generic clitic se, the zero strategy (with a 3 rd person singular verb form) and você (you), which is preferably overt. Finally, we have a [+1st person/+plural] category, which does include the speaker, represented by nós (we) and a gente (the people, the folks=we), with considerable advantage with respect to the former. The variation in each category disposed along our scale is not a stable phenomenon: each point has a strong competitor to represent each degree of indeterminate reference as the change progresses.

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