As formas da função acusativa em cartas de amor do Sertão Pernambucano: entre variação e tradição discursiva

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the forms of reference to the interlocutor in the accusative function, in love letters written in the 1950s. As for the analysis material, we used a corpus composed of 22 love letters written by non-illustrious people of the Pernambuco hinterland, 21 missives narrated by a male letter writer and 1 letter written by a female letter writer, previously collected by the members of the project Para a da History of Brazilian Portuguese - Pernambuco Regional Team. For that, we are based on the theoretical-methodological orientations of Historical Sociolinguistics and the concept of Discursive Traditions. Methodologically, we identified the contexts of occurrence of accusative forms of reference to the interlocutor, obtaining a total of 64 data, distributed as follows: 58 occurrences of the clitic, 4 data of him and 2 record of you. Regarding the selected factors, namely, the relation between the accusative and the subject, as well as the position of the accusative, we obtained the following results regarding the first factor: i) in relation to the letters in which the tu appeared as an exclusive strategy, the clitic was categorical with 18 dice; ii) the missives with exclusive use of you were recorded alternating forms accusative te, you and you presenting 9, 3 and 2 data, respectively; iii) in the cards with variable use of you and you, the clitic te was also the most productive strategy, with 24 dice rather than one occurrence of the clitic him; iv) in contexts without reference to the second person, the clitic figured you as a categorical strategy, presenting 7 data. Regarding pronominal placement, we obtained 50 data on proclysis and 14 data on enclysis. Regarding the contexts favorable to the pronominal placement of the accusative postponed to the verb, we recorded the following cases: i) beginning of sentence; ii) infinitive verb. Thus, our research meets what Lopes et al. (2018) state that, observing that you entered the 2nd person paradigm effectively as a subject, however, in the other syntactic functions, it suffers some resistance, since we observe the predominance of the clitic in the analyzed missives, regardless of the type of subject employed. In addition, we observed the preference for placing the accusative in the pre-verbal position, which meets the results obtained in studies on the same phenomenon (SOUZA, 2014).