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.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientÃfico e TecnolÃgico / Esta dissertaÃÃo trata do comportamento do clÃtico das estruturas de-transitivas mediais quanto à alternÃncia ausÃncia/presenÃa, no falar popular fortalezense. Teoricamente, o trabalho ancorou-se na associaÃÃo dos postulados da SociolinguÃstica Variacionista (LABOV, 1963, 1972, 1978, 1982, 1994, 2001; WEINER; LABOV, 1977; WEINREICH, LABOV; HERZOG, 2006) e do Funcionalismo LinguÃstico Norte-Americano (GIVÃN, 1984, 1993, 1995, 2001), resultando na configuraÃÃo teÃrica denominada de Sociofuncionalismo (TAVARES, 2003). Em termos metodolÃgicos, a pesquisa contou com uma amostragem de 36 inquÃritos do tipo DiÃlogo entre Informante e Documentador (DID), extraÃdos do Banco de Dados Norma Oral Popular de Fortaleza (NORPOFOR). Foram acionados alguns grupos de fatores linguÃsticos (forma verbal, tipo de mudanÃa indicado pelo verbo, pessoa gramatical do sujeito e modalidade) e extralinguÃsticos (faixa etÃria, sexo e escolaridade) os quais podem exercer influÃncia no contexto variÃvel em questÃo. Os 626 dados coletados passaram por tratamento estatÃstico atravÃs do uso do programa computacional GOLDVARB X, que realizou uma rodada multivariada do fenÃmeno mediante a acomodaÃÃo estruturada das ocorrÃncias e das variÃveis controladas. Os resultados demonstraram a primazia da presenÃa em relaÃÃo à ausÃncia. Por ordem de seleÃÃo estatÃstica, mostraram-se como significativos para o fenÃmeno: a) faixa etÃria â com predominÃncia de ausÃncia do marcador pronominal mÃdio entre os mais velhos e de presenÃa entre os mais jovens; b) a pessoa gramatical do sujeito â com propensÃo de ausÃncia na 1 e de presenÃa na 2 e na 3Â; c) o tipo de mudanÃa indicado pelo verbo â com predominÃncia de ausÃncia nos fatores posiÃÃo, estado fÃsico e condiÃÃo e de presenÃa no fator estado mental; d) a escolaridade â com propensÃo de ausÃncia entre os informantes que tÃm de 9 a 11 anos de estudo e de presenÃa entre os que tÃm de 0 a 4 anos e de 5 a 8 anos. Concluiu-se, portanto, que o clÃtico mÃdio està passando por um processo de variaÃÃo no PortuguÃs Oral Popular de Fortaleza, segundo a influÃncia de variÃveis internas e externas à lÃngua. / This dissertation is about the behavior of the clitic of the middle de-transitive structures concerning to the alternance of absence/ presence in the fortalezense popular spoken language. Theoretically this work has been anchored in the association of the postulates of the Sociolinguistic Analysis (LABOV, 1963, 1972, 1978, 1982, 1994, 2001; WEINER; LABOV, 1977; WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006) and the North American Linguistic Functionalism (GIVÃN, 1984, 1993, 1995, 2001), resulting in the theoretical configuration called Sociofunctionalism (TAVARES, 2003). Concerning to methodological aspects, the research had a sample of 36 inquiries of Dialogue-type between Informant and Documenter (DID), extracted from the database of the Norma Oral do PortuguÃs Popular de Fortaleza (NORPOFOR). Some groups of linguistic (verbal form, type of change indicated by the verb, subject grammatical person and modality) and extralinguistic factors (age group, gender and schooling) which can influence the variable context studied were triggered. The 626 collected data have gone through statistics treatment by the use of the computational program GOLDVARB X, which performed a multivariate round of the phenomenon by the structured accomodation of the occurences and controlled variables. The results have showed the primacy of the presence in relation to the absence. Through the order of statistics selection, the following have appeared as significative to the phenomenon: a) age group â with the predominance of absence of the medium pronominal marker among the elders and the presence among the youngers; b) the grammatical person of the subject â with propensity of abscence in the 1st and the presence in the 2nd and in the 3rd; c) the type of chance indicated by the verb â with propensity of absence in the factors of position, physical state and condition and of the presence in the factor of mental state; d) the schooling â with propensity of absence among the informants who are from 9 to 11 years of study and the presence among the ones who are from 0 to 4 years and from 5 to 8 years of study. It was concluded, then, the medium clitic is going through a process of variation in the popular oral Portuguese spoken in Fortaleza, according to the influence of internal and external variables to the language.

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.

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.

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.

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This study examines the interaction between language experience and Spanish morphosyntactic development using longitudinal data of Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Specifically, this study explores how language exposure and usage influence the production accuracy of articles, direct object clitics and subjunctives across 4 years. Analyses of growth trajectories show that the trajectories differ by both language ability groups and morphosyntactic structures. Among the three grammatical markers, the TD group demonstrates different patterns of growth while the DLD group demonstrates consistent ascending trajectories. The accuracy of articles is the highest in all three markers across 4 years for both TD and DLD groups. The accuracy of direct object clitics in the DLD group increases over time while it decreases slightly in the TD group. The accuracy of subjunctives increases in both TD and DLD groups, but the increase was higher in the DLD group than in the TD group. Results of the generalized linear model (GLM) of the accuracy of three grammatical markers indicate that the contributing factors differ by the marker: language exposure, language usage, language ability group and grade level have significant effects on accuracy of articles; language ability group is the only contributing factor to the production accuracy of direct object clitics; and language exposure, language ability group and grade level significantly influence the production accuracy of subjunctives. Results of the GLM of accuracy at the fourth assessment time also reveal that contributing factors to accuracy of fourth-year performance differ by grammatical markers: a significant effect of accuracy at first observation time for articles and direct object clitics, a significant effect of baseline accuracy for articles and subjunctives, and a significant effect of language ability for subjunctives. These results confirm that articles, direct object clitics and subjunctives are reliable markers of language impairment for Spanish-English bilingual children. This study also describes the specific influence of language experience within the language ability group and grade level. The influence of language experience on production accuracy differs by language ability group and morphosyntactic structures. / Communication Sciences

This dissertation explores the interaction of syntax and morphology in the morpholog- ical realization of AGREE-relations. I present two case studies of derivational interactions of AGREE-processes where the morphological realization of the later processes are affected by the earlier ones. The two cases studied differ in the way probes and goals interact. The first part of the dissertation explores restrictions on clitic combinations where two goals vie for the features of one probe. The second part discusses the reverse situation, where two probes are agreeing with the same goal. The first configuration arises in restrictions on clitic combinations where v can AGREE with an indirect object and a direct object one at a time (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 2005b, Béjar and Rezác 2003). These configurations give rise to a form of competition: the sec- ond argument will fail to AGREE in any features that it shares with the first. I show that this form of competition extends from restrictions involving local person arguments, where it has been used so far, to restrictions involving third person and plural, which have so far been treated as morphological. Whereas the restrictions on local person lead to ungrammaticality, those on third person and plural result in impoverished morphological realization. I argue that this difference indicates a different role of AGREE for local person vs. third person and plural. Recent work as shown that local person has special syntactic licensing needs (e.g. Béjar and Rezác 2003, Baker 2008, Preminger 2011b). Third person and plural on the other hand, I argue, are syntactically wellformed on their own, but require AGREE to be visible to lexical insertion at PF. Failure to AGREE will lead to absence of morphological realization or ungrammaticality as a function of the features involved. Once restrictions on third person arguments are treated as syntactic, much of the variation across languages in their morphological realization follows from differences in the PF-inventory. The second situation, two probes AGREEING with the same goal, arises in agreement with objects in Hindi-Urdu. The second part of the dissertation discusses two asymmetries in agreement of T with subjects and objects in conjunction structures. While T-agreement with objects shows sensitivity to linear order (i.a. closest conjunct agreement), T-agreement with subjects does not. I argue that the differences follow from the activity of the goal at the time of agreement. While subjects are syntactically active at the time T probes them, objects are not, because they have already been assigned case by v. As a consequence, the syntactic relation between T and an object cannot value the T's probe in the syntax. Non- syntactic effects like the relevance of linear order affect agreement exactly when valuation cannot be achieved in the syntax. Both case studies lead to the proposal that syntactically wellformed derivations can be ruled out at PF by failure of lexical insertion. This can happen in two ways. The discus- sion of restrictions on clitic combinations will lead to the conclusion that some languages allow the syntax to generate wellformed structures that contain nodes with so few features that PF cannot insert an exponent for them. The discussion of agreement in Hindi-Urdu will lead to the proposal that the grammar can generate feature bundles with inconsistent features that cannot be spelled out in one form. Overall, PF does both less and more than is often assumed. The restrictions on third person and plural discussed in the first part are traditionally considered to be the result of morphological operations that change the feature content of clitics (Bonet 1991, 1993, 1995, Grimshaw 1997, Noyer 1997). The proposal here reduces the role of PF in these restrictions to spelling out syntactic structures that have reduced feature content as the result of syntactic interactions. Similarly, the proposal about Hindi-Urdu tightly delimits the space where non-syntactic effects on agreement arise. At the same time, PF can rule out syntactically wellformed structures, which is not typically assumed to be possible.

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