Invariable demonstratives with personal reference in Brazilian Portuguese
Pronouns, N-effect, Features
This dissertation adresses the following invariable demonstratives in Brazilian Portuguese: isto, isso and aquilo. The goals here are to describe and to analyse their personal reference, based on the fact that, besides either placing information in space and time or referring back to elements with [-human] feature, these demonstratives can also refer to elements with [+human] feature – which is a typical behavior of personal pronouns. Such possibility may trigger a negative effect in interpretation, and it induces, thus, a derogatory, a pejorative, or an ironic reading. This phenomenon seems to result from a kind of a neutralization in gender, entailing an N-effect, attested in contexts with the following set of requirements: i) complementary distribution with their morphological gender displaying counterparts; ii) presence of [+human] feature; iii) occurrence of a contextually salient referent, in discourse, and part of the both speaker’s and hearer’s shared knowledge.