The morphosyntactic behavior of canonical and non-canonical third-person possessive pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese
Third-person possessive pronoun, Binding Theory, Generative Grammar, Antecedent, Syntax.
The purpose of this work is to describe the morphosyntactic behavior of canonical and non-canonical third-person possessive pronouns, taking into account the position that they occur in the noun phrase, the source of nominal agreement, the nature of its antecedents and semantic behavior. By canonical possessive pronoun we mean forms that have a morphological mark of genitive (seu / sua), and by non-canonical forms composed by the preposition de + full pronoun (dele / dela). For the description, we make use of the assumptions of Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1957 and subsequent), more specifically the Binding Theory proposed by Chomsky (1981). We discuss the concept of pronoun and its deictic nature and we present the perspective traditional grammar has of possessive pronouns. We turn to the studies of Cerqueira (1996) - who analyzes them from a syntactic point of view, observing its ordering in the sentence - and Müller (1997) - that makes a parallel between syntax and semantics - as a starting point for understanding the behavior of third person possessive pronouns. We observed some restrictions in the binding of the possessive pronouns to their antecedents. Some features such as animacity and definiteness of the antecedent were also shown to be relevant in the distribution of the possessives. Pre and post-nominal positions, in the same way, were relevant in the distribution of these pronouns. Finally, we present some evidence to consider the canonical forms of the possessive pronoun as anaphora and noncanonical forms, as pronouns, according to the principles of the Binding Theory.