Ditransitive sentences and indirect object in Bazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper, the syntax of dative arguments (indirect objects) in Brazilian Portuguese is examined in a crosslinguistic perspective with European Portuguese. It is shown that the grammatical expression of BP indirect object has undergone significant changes, which were essentially triggered by two related phenomena: a decrease in the use of the preposition a introducing the indirect object, which is replaced by the preposition para, and a decrease in the use of the dative pronoun, particularly the 3rd person clitic lhe(s),which is substituted for innovative strategies of pronominalization. In European Portuguese, differently from BP, dative arguments are consistently introduced by the preposition a, and pronominalization involves the 3rd person dative clitic lhe(s). Based on the theory of applicative heads proposed in Pylkkänen (2008) and a particular notion of ditransitivity, proposed in Cuervo (2003/2010), we take these changes as evidence for the loss of the low applicative construction in Brazilian Portuguese, coupled with the loss of the morphosyntactic ditransitivity. Thus the connection between the morphological case system and the expression of parameters supports a view of syntactic change according to which parametric variation is determined in the lexicon, in terms of the grammatical features of functional heads.