The pronominal subject in a context of parametric change: high school students’ writing

Abstract

Variationist researches show that spoken Brazilian Portuguese undergoes a change regarding the representation of referential pronominal subjects with preference for expressed subjects rather than null ones in every grammatical person, which suggests a parametric change in progress, from a null subject language to a non null subject language. In order to examine the possible implementation of the change in the written language, the present work investigates the representation of definite and arbitrary pronominal subjects in different types of texts produced by high school students from a public school in Rio de Janeiro. The results attest the conservative character of writing, since the preference is the null subject. However, the general rates of null subjects (42%) is relevant when one takes into account the fact that Portuguese is considered a pro-drop language, which confirms, in part, our hypothesis.