Clíticos dativos em cartas pessoais do Ceará do século XX

Abstract

The article analyzes the alternation of the pronouns te and lhe in the function of dative for 2nd person, in personal letters of the state of Ceará, Brazil, written during the 20th century, with the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov , 1972, 1994) and the general principles of Historical Sociolinguistics (Conde Silvestre, 2007). The sample consists of 186 personal letters written. In the analysis of such variability, some groups of factors were considered: semantic type of the verb; structure of the verb; position of the clitic; and extralinguistic variables decade in which the letters were written and sex of the sender. As a methodological tool, it was used the computer program GoldVarb X (Sankoff; Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005). It was concluded that, in the letters of the sample, the most common form was ‘lhe’, that the position of the clitic has a strong influence on the choice of it, and the alternation ‘te’~‘lhe’ is stable throughout the 20th Century in the variety of Portuguese used in Ceará, not signaling therefore for a future change with the predominance of one of two forms.