The use of pronominal forms in complement clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this study, in a written sentence completion experiment, we contrast European and Brazilian Portuguese in what concerns the production of null, overt pronouns and full NPs, as subjects of verb complement clauses, to refer to the previously mentioned entities (or to extra-discursive referents). Results show that overall participants prefer to use null pronouns and that these pronouns are preferentially used to refer to the closest NP, especially in BP. Moreover, overt pronouns and full NPs are hardly used, being the later more frequent than the former, especially to refer to extra-discursive referents. Although the preference to refer to the closest subject with the null pronoun is in line with previous studies, high frequency of null pronouns and low frequency of overt ones in BP is not. We propose that these results might be explained by the characteristics of both the tested conditions and of the participants tested in our study.