Esse trabalho baseia-se no estudo da colocação pronominal, pois este já é reconhecidamente um fator crucial na identificação de diferenças gramaticais entre PE e PB, verificadas desde o século XVIII.O objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se há alguma característica na linguagem dos jornais de imprensa negra que os diferencie dos da imprensa de circulação mais ampla e de outros documentos da época. E, assim, confirmar a diferença entre as variantes brasileira e europeia da língua portuguesa não é apenas superficial, mas gramatical, uma vez que enquanto o PE se tornou uma língua de colocação enclítica dos pronomes átonos, o PB tornou-se a mais proclítica das línguas românicas. Sendo assim, foram analisados dois jornais: O Patrocínio (1925- 1930), um periódico da imprensa negra da cidade de Piracicaba; e, a título de comparação, A Gazeta de Piracicaba (1882-1937), um exemplar da imprensa majoritária da época. Os jornais são constituídos de textos de diversos gêneros que trazem, portanto, dados que possuem características distintas e particulares em um mesmo periódico. Nesse contexto, o interesse pela imprensa negra surgiu da possibilidade de analisar textos escritos majoritariamente por negros e para negros. Devido a fatores sociais ligados à escolarização da população negra do período, havia a possibilidade do vernáculo da época encontrar-se mais exposto nesse material. Sendo assim, pretendia-se observar se a colocação brasileira se apresentava de forma mais saliente nesses textos que nos da imprensa majoritária. Porém, a história social mostrou que esses periódicos foram escritos por negros que haviam tido acesso, das mais diversas formas, aos padrões cultos da língua. Dessa maneira, a fim de se adequar aos padrões da sociedade da época, buscavam manter a variante culta da língua em sua escrita. De fato, na comparação dos dados da imprensa negra com os da imprensa majoritária foi possível perceber - no que se refere ao fenômeno estudado - uma grande semelhante entre ambos os jornais. Em particular, verificou-se que esses periódicos apresentam padrões de colocação próximos, ou seja, ambos mostram, ao lado da colocação lusitana, a colocação brasileira em percentuais que não se diferenciam significativamente. / This research is based on the investigation of clitic placement in Portuguese, since this a factor of great importance to identify grammatical differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP), acknowledged since the eighteenth century. The main aim is to verify whether there is any specific characteristic on the texts from the so called black press that distinguishes them from the major press from the period. And, then, confirm that the differences between the Brazilian and European variants exist not only superficially, but also in their inner grammar features. While EP has become a language that prefers enclitic placement, BP is the most proclitic of all romance languages. Hence, two newspapers have been analyzed: One of them, named O Patrocínio (1925-1930), represents the so black press, and the other one, called Gazeta de Piracicaba (1882-1937) is from the major press. Newspapers consist of different text genres, thus this data contains different and particular features among the same paper. In this context, the analysis of a black press newspaper is particularly interesting once the texts were mainly written by afro-descendents people, to afro-descendents. Therefore, the language that was actually used by the people at that time was expected to be found. However, the social and historical aspects of the period showed that, somehow, the main writers of these papers had access to the normative grammar of the language. So, as their purpose was to fit in the society of the period, they tried to maintain, in their texts, what was considered to be the correct grammar at the time. Hence, when the data from both papers was compared, it was verified that they have a very similar clitic placement. That is, both of them present the standard European placement along with the Brazilian placement with very similar percentages.

Resumption has been the object of lively research (Doron 1982; Sells 1984; McClauskey 1990; 2002; Shlonsky 1992; Cann 1999; Sharvit 1999; Alexopoulou 2006; Guilliot 2006; Malkawi 2009; Rouveret 2011) and various analyses consider it a form of agreement, a last syntactic resort or a special kind of ellipsis. On the theoretical side, I survey the issues that are the background of the research, such as the nature of the pronouns that are involved in resumption. I develop a syntactic analysis of resumptive pronouns in which they are clitics (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999; Dechaine and Wiltschko 2002; Roberts 2010) and they form a complex determiner phrase together with the relative pronoun or interrogative pronoun. I argue that when resumption is obligatory, it follows from requirements in the syntax and only when it is optional it is a phenomenon at the syntax-pragmatics interface. On the empirical side, I contrast and compare the pronominal paradigms of Arabic and Romanian, an Eastern Romance language which strikingly shows a similar pattern of resumption as Arabic: (i) obligatory resumption in relativization, (ii) designated relative pronoun. Though for Romanian nobody has disputed the nature of the clitic pronouns as clitic in the sense that I am adopting (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999), it has not been thoroughly documented either. I then discuss the pragmatics of resumption in contexts in which it is optional, such as D-linked questions in Arabic. The difference between obligatory resumption and optional resumption is not found in the syntax, because this same syntactic derivation is associated with different interpretive effects depending on whether it occurs in obligatory or in optional contexts. I argue that the presence of the pronoun when it is not required by the syntax triggers a change in interpretation: the module pragmatics assigns it a pragmatic feature.

The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind.

The goal of this work is to provide an account of dative clitic dependencies in constructions with raising verbs such as to seem in Romanian. Dative clitic experiencers as quirky subjects and dative clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) constructions are discussed from a syntactic point of view and experimentally tested in a psycholinguistics study. The study contributes to current innovations in the Minimalist Program, presenting new perspectives on Romanian clitic dependencies in raising constructions partially addressed in earlier generative grammar. This study poses new questions regarding raising, the intervention effects of dative clitic experiencers, and the effects of clitic dependencies in ditransitive constructions. Chapter II presents an overview of Romanian raising constructions without dative experiencers. I show that Romanian possesses three raising constructions, based on the type of the embedded clause: subjunctive, infinitive, and indicative. Each of these has three potential locations for the nominative subject, argued to be generated in the embedded clause. Formal mechanisms such as Long Distance and Multiple Agree, Movement, Case and EPP are considered independent of one another. Dative clitic experiencers in raising constructions, analyzed in Chapter III, are claimed to be quirky subjects and to structurally occupy the highest position in the sentence. Having established the role of dative clitic experiencers, I discuss raising constructions involving dative experiencers generated and/or surfacing in various positions, and their effects on operations such as Agree and Move. I then discuss Experiencer Islands, formed by matrix and embedded experiencers in the same utterance, and present the contexts in which they occur. A Grammaticality Judgment Test confirms the existence of such restriction in Romanian. Furthermore, I present an analysis of Experiencer Islands and discuss observed exceptions to the restriction. Dative clitic dependencies such as CLLD constructions and Long Distance CLLD Constructions are also analyzed in this thesis. The experimental study presented in Chapter IV supports theoretical claims and demonstrates that Romanian speakers are aware of dative clitic dependencies, such as clitic experiencer dependencies and clitic dependencies in CLLD constructions, possess the grammatical knowledge of biclausal constructions involving dative clitic dependencies and have the ability to recognize such dependencies.

The study of clitic clusters and the restrictions that surface when two or more clitics are combined have long intrigued linguists and, as such, clitic phenomena are at the core of an ever-growing body of research in linguistic theory. However, three aspects remain largely unexplored when it comes to clitic cluster constraints, namely the evolution of these restrictions through time, the perception and processing of different clitic combinations, both acceptable and unacceptable, by native speakers and the acquisition of such combinations by non-native speakers. This dissertation, which focuses on 1st and 2nd person clitic clusters in Spanish, aims to shed new light on clitic phenomena with a new analysis and new data from all these perspectives. Specifically, I study the effects that case and marked features have on Spanish clitic combinations, both synchronically and diachronically. In addition, I explore the effects of clitic combination restrictions in language processing and analyze the learnability issues derived from such restrictions in three groups of speakers of Spanish as a second language whose L1s are English, French and Romanian, respectively. At a particular level, this dissertation is a study of clitic cluster constraints from different perspectives, both traditional and new, namely linguistic theory, diachrony, language processing and language acquisition. At a general level, it constitutes an attempt to explore the ways in which linguistic theory can guide applied research and, conversely, the ways in which experimental data may contribute to linguistic theory.

The goal of this work is to provide an account of dative clitic dependencies in constructions with raising verbs such as to seem in Romanian. Dative clitic experiencers as quirky subjects and dative clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) constructions are discussed from a syntactic point of view and experimentally tested in a psycholinguistics study. The study contributes to current innovations in the Minimalist Program, presenting new perspectives on Romanian clitic dependencies in raising constructions partially addressed in earlier generative grammar. This study poses new questions regarding raising, the intervention effects of dative clitic experiencers, and the effects of clitic dependencies in ditransitive constructions. Chapter II presents an overview of Romanian raising constructions without dative experiencers. I show that Romanian possesses three raising constructions, based on the type of the embedded clause: subjunctive, infinitive, and indicative. Each of these has three potential locations for the nominative subject, argued to be generated in the embedded clause. Formal mechanisms such as Long Distance and Multiple Agree, Movement, Case and EPP are considered independent of one another. Dative clitic experiencers in raising constructions, analyzed in Chapter III, are claimed to be quirky subjects and to structurally occupy the highest position in the sentence. Having established the role of dative clitic experiencers, I discuss raising constructions involving dative experiencers generated and/or surfacing in various positions, and their effects on operations such as Agree and Move. I then discuss Experiencer Islands, formed by matrix and embedded experiencers in the same utterance, and present the contexts in which they occur. A Grammaticality Judgment Test confirms the existence of such restriction in Romanian. Furthermore, I present an analysis of Experiencer Islands and discuss observed exceptions to the restriction. Dative clitic dependencies such as CLLD constructions and Long Distance CLLD Constructions are also analyzed in this thesis. The experimental study presented in Chapter IV supports theoretical claims and demonstrates that Romanian speakers are aware of dative clitic dependencies, such as clitic experiencer dependencies and clitic dependencies in CLLD constructions, possess the grammatical knowledge of biclausal constructions involving dative clitic dependencies and have the ability to recognize such dependencies.

The goal of this work is to provide an account of dative clitic dependencies in constructions with raising verbs such as to seem in Romanian. Dative clitic experiencers as quirky subjects and dative clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) constructions are discussed from a syntactic point of view and experimentally tested in a psycholinguistics study. The study contributes to current innovations in the Minimalist Program, presenting new perspectives on Romanian clitic dependencies in raising constructions partially addressed in earlier generative grammar. This study poses new questions regarding raising, the intervention effects of dative clitic experiencers, and the effects of clitic dependencies in ditransitive constructions. Chapter II presents an overview of Romanian raising constructions without dative experiencers. I show that Romanian possesses three raising constructions, based on the type of the embedded clause: subjunctive, infinitive, and indicative. Each of these has three potential locations for the nominative subject, argued to be generated in the embedded clause. Formal mechanisms such as Long Distance and Multiple Agree, Movement, Case and EPP are considered independent of one another. Dative clitic experiencers in raising constructions, analyzed in Chapter III, are claimed to be quirky subjects and to structurally occupy the highest position in the sentence. Having established the role of dative clitic experiencers, I discuss raising constructions involving dative experiencers generated and/or surfacing in various positions, and their effects on operations such as Agree and Move. I then discuss Experiencer Islands, formed by matrix and embedded experiencers in the same utterance, and present the contexts in which they occur. A Grammaticality Judgment Test confirms the existence of such restriction in Romanian. Furthermore, I present an analysis of Experiencer Islands and discuss observed exceptions to the restriction. Dative clitic dependencies such as CLLD constructions and Long Distance CLLD Constructions are also analyzed in this thesis. The experimental study presented in Chapter IV supports theoretical claims and demonstrates that Romanian speakers are aware of dative clitic dependencies, such as clitic experiencer dependencies and clitic dependencies in CLLD constructions, possess the grammatical knowledge of biclausal constructions involving dative clitic dependencies and have the ability to recognize such dependencies.

I investigate the phonology of prosodic clitics--independent syntactic words not parsed as independent prosodic words--in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. I ask, first, how clitics are organized into prosodic structures, and second, how this is determined by the grammar. Following Zec (1997, 2005), I look at several clitic categories, including negation, prepositions, complementizers, conjunctions, and second-position clitics. Based on a reanalysis of word accent (Browne and McCawley 1965, Inkelas and Zec 1988, Zec 1999), I argue that in some cases where a preposition, complementizer, or conjunction fails to realize accent determined by a following word, it is not a proclitic-- that is, prosodified with the following word--but rather a free clitic parsed directly by a phonological phrase. Conversely, the second-position clitics are not always enclitic--that is, prosodified with a preceding word--but are sometimes free. Their second-position word order results not from enclisis, but from the avoidance of free clitics at phrase edges, where they would interfere with the alignment of phonological phrases to prosodic words. Regarding the determination of clisis by the grammar, I argue for an interface constraint approach (Selkirk 1995, Truckenbrodt 1995), whereby prosodic structures are built according to general constraints on their well-formedness, and on their interface to syntactic structures. I contrast this with the subcategorization approach , which sees clisis as specified for each clitic (Klavans 1982, Radanovic-Kocic 1988, Zec and Inkelas 1990). The comparison across clitic categories provides key support for the interface constraint approach, showing that their prosody depends on their syntactic configurations and phonological shapes, rather than on arbitrary subcategorizations. Prosodic differences across categories are a derivative effect of their configuration in the clause, and of the division of the clause into phonological phrases. The relevance of phonological phrases consists in how their edges discourage some kinds of clisis, blocking, for example, proclisis of complementizers and conjunctions to their complements. Free clisis is disfavored at phrase edges, producing the second-position effect. Thus, the interface constraint approach leads to a unified account of word, phrase, and clitic prosody.

Este estudo, na perspectiva variacionista, visou a verificar se informantes cursando a oitava série do Ensino Fundamental, o terceiro ano do Ensino Médio e o quarto semestre da Licenciatura em Letras usam o clítico acusativo como uma variante de objeto direto pressuposto, em seus textos dissertativos e narrativos. Além disto, pretendeu determinar quais outras formas de objeto direto aparecem nesses textos, com quais delas o clítico acusativo rivaliza e que fatores condicionam a ocorrência dessas variantes. Os resultados indicam que, em relação às variáveis extra lingüísticas, o clítico é mais freqüente no texto narrativo e menos freqüente nas produções dos alunos do Ensino Superior. Indicam também que o clítico é favorecido quando seu antecedente é sujeito de oração anterior e que o verbo triargumental e o co-referente com traço semântico [+animado] condicionam o aparecimento do clítico na redação escolar. / This study aimed at verifying, under the Variation Theory perspective, whether eight grade elementary school students, high school third grade students and undergraduate Language fourth semester students use the accusative clitic as a variant for the presumed direct object on their compositions. It was also intended to determine which other kinds of direct object appear on their texts, which of them compete against the accusative clitic, and which features constrain such variants. The results indicate a decrease in the use of the accusative clitic as schooling increases. Therefore, its use is less frequent in the texts written by undergraduate students than in the ones written by elementary school students. As to linguistic variables, it was observed that the clitic is favored when it follows the subject of a preceding sentence. Triargumental verbs and [+animate] semantic feature also contribute to the appearance of clitics in school compositions.

This study aims to analyze the strategies of performance of the anaphoric direct object in its substitution to the third person accusative clitic in the speech of the town of Mata Grande, State of Alagoas, Brazil. That was made comparing the quantitative results of two social factors of our searching, age and schooling level, with the results from speech data in the city of São Paulo, brought up by the corpus collected by Duarte (1986). Thus we were based on the methodology and theory of variationist sociolinguistics and the principles and parameters theory. The first one aims to search, describe and explain the speech variation grades, making up the relation between the social context and the linguistic context of the speaker; the second one has given theoretical support to studies in comparative syntax. On the way to elaborating our corpus, we collected data of both male and female 12 speakers of Mata Grande, divided into three age ranges and with different schooling levels. The results were very meaningful once we established that the language spoken in Mata Grande suffers a process of change and confirmed that the studied phenomenon is simultaneously occurring at the two regions, owning similar linguistic features. / Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Alagoas / A presente pesquisa tem como principal objetivo analisar as estratégias de realização do objeto direto anafórico em substituição ao clítico acusativo de terceira pessoa na língua falada em Mata Grande-AL. Buscamos, a partir de resultados quantitativos, estabelecer uma comparação dos fatores sociais: idade e escolaridade, com resultados de nossa pesquisa com resultados de dados de língua falada da cidade de São Paulo os quais constituem o corpus do trabalho realizado por Duarte (1986). Para tanto, tomamos como base os pressupostos teóricos da Sociolingüística Variacionista, que procura investigar, descrever e explicar o grau de variação, estabelecendo a relação entre o contexto social e lingüístico do falante, assim como o modelo teórico de Princípios e Parâmetros que tem dado o suporte teórico aos estudos em sintaxe comparativa, cf. Chomsky & Lasnik (1993). Para constituição do corpus, utilizamos uma amostra da fala de 12 informantes matagrandenses, de ambos os sexos, distribuídos em três faixas etárias e com escolaridade variada. Os resultados foram bastante reveladores não somente porque constatamos que a língua falada em Mata Grande está em processo de mudança com relação à variação do objeto direto anafórico, mas também porque confirmamos que o fenômeno estudado está ocorrendo nas duas regiões simultaneamente com características lingüísticas semelhantes.