Null subjects in contemporary Brazilian filmic speech

Abstract

The present research, based on a corpus of contemporary Brazilian filmic speech – Urban Carioca Sub-Corpus from the I-Fala Corpus of Luso-Brazilian Film Dialogues as a resource for L1 & L2 Learning and Linguistic Research (DE ROSA et al., 2017) –, illustrates how Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has undergone a process of change regarding the representation of referential subjects. A preference for overt pronominal subjects is on the rise, thus transitioning contemporary Brazilian Portuguese from a null subject language to a partial null subject language. The current paper revisits De Rosa (2017), this time including third person subjects and using actual film dialogue transcriptions rather than scripts. The occurrence of null and overt subjects in the corpus is discussed both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Keywords

• português brasileiro
• línguas de sujeito nulo
• sujeitos referenciais
• fala fílmica
• português europeu.