Variation in the order sv/vs in unaccusative verbs and inchoative: a study focused in formal writing of Lages county, Santa Catarina state

Abstract

This study investigates the variation of SV/VS in declarative sentences containing unaccusative and inchoatives verbs. This work has used some reader's letters from the newspapers of the municipality of Lages – Santa Catarina State, Brazil – from the 19 and 20 centuries, drawn from the research project bank: Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB). Such research is founded in variational sociolinguistics (cf. Labov 1972, 1994) and empirical and descriptive of the syntactic and semantic behavior of unaccusative verbs performed by Ciriaco and Cançado (2006) for inergativos and unaccusative verbs and study Coelho (2000) e Coelho et al (2006). The research uses the prototypical classification proposed by the authors for the study of these verbs. The results found indicate that postposition of the subject is favored when we have unaccusative verbs. We still observed that the occurrence of postposition of the subject in the 20 century increased when compared to that of the 19 century.