Experimental evidence for 2SG direct object pronoun preferences in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

We examine the competition in Brazilian Portuguese 2SG direct object pronoun expression between clitic te and tonic você (e.g. Eu te vi ~ Eu vi você). We offer data from an online forced-choice survey, analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression, to show that dialectal subject pronoun preference (tu/você) and contrast both play a significant role in conditioning this choice. Furthermore, we find that contrast, despite its traditional treatment as binary, shows gradient effects on pronoun choice- while te is the preferred DO pronoun overall, você is the variant preferred in contrastive contexts, especially in cases of double contrast. --- Original in English.

Keywords

• objetos diretos, contraste, português brasileiro, variação.