Main Morphosyntactic Changes and Grammaticalization Processes

The partial loss of free inversion and of referential null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese

“…However in BP, such a constraint has been aggravated not only by the loss of 3 rd person clitics, which are replaced by weak pronouns optionally null in anaphoric contexts (cf. Kato & Tarallo 1993), but also by the fact that 2 nd person clitic te is in variation with the weak pronoun você 'you', which is originally an address form Vossa Mercê 'Your Grace', that fully grammaticalized as a pronoun in BP and used in nominative, accusative, and oblique functions (Lopes & Brocardo 2016). Since its implementation through the 20 th century, there has been a competition with canonical 2 nd person tu 'you' and the accusative and oblique forms associated with it.…”

“…Você is now in competition with 2 nd person pronoun tu 'you', which also lost its canonical distinctive ending in speech. The inflectional reduction has been aggravated by the grammaticalization of another nominal expression a gente 'the people', which entered the BP pronominal system in competition with nós 'we', very similar to French on/nous, and also requires 3 rd person singular agreement (see Lopes & Brocardo 2016).…”

Brazilian Portuguese

“…On the other hand, pronoun nós is extremely strong in EP and still outnumbers a gentewhich makes some specialists, like Lopes and Brocardo (2016), claim that você and a gente are not yet fully grammaticalized in EP. Vós has also disappeared in EP (although it is still attested in some more isolated areas) and has been replaced by vocês, but this pronoun usually occurs in combination with clitic, oblique and possessive pronouns respectively, vos, convosco, vosso, belonging to the obsolescent nominative vós paradigm, all lost in BP.…”