A new view on double subject sentences in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to investigate the behavior of the subject and the resumptive pronoun in the double subject constructions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). From syntactic, semantic and prosodic evidences, it will be possible to verify (i) if such constructions can be analyzed as cases of left dislocation; (ii) if these sentences characterize BP as a prominent topic language; (iii) if the pre-verbal subject behaves as a topic; (iv) if the subject has the same behavior of the dislocated object with the resumption of the pronoun; (v) if the resumptive pronoun that recovers the pre-verbal subject in these constructions should be analyzed as a clitic (a head) or as a weak pronoun, occupying the position of specifier. The hypothesis of this work is that the resumptive pronoun can visibly instantiate the head of the SubjP functional projection (RIZZI, 2005), being the lexical realization of Subj, attracts a constituent compatible with the feature "subject of predication" (cf. CARDINALETTI, 1997, 2004).