Verb agreement in the third plural person in European Portuguese: variation or semi-categorical rules?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to characterize the verb agreement in the third person plural in the European Portuguese, and to present the points involved in this phenomenon. For the analysis, we resorted on the Theory of Linguistic Variation (LABOV 1972, 1994, 2003). The interviews debated in the quantitative analysis are from “Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese”, published by the Linguistics Centre of the University of Lisbon (CLUL). The results show the influence of subject position, semantic feature of the subject, and morphological type of the subject in Linguistics.

Keywords

• Concordância verbal
• Português europeu
• Terceira pessoa do plural