O apagamento do sujeito no crioulo português de Málaca (Malásia)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates variation in the deletion of the subject in the grammar of the Portuguese lexified creole language of Malacca, known as kristang, a phenomenon initially reported by Baxter (1988). The study focuses on the dependent variable, the pronominal subject, in terms of two variants: actual pronominal subject and null subject. The main interest of the study is to investigate and describe the structural, discursive (pragmatic) and extralinguistic conditions that permit null subject pronouns in kristang in data from eighteen sociolinguistic interviews. Thus, it is intended to situate kristang in relation to traditional and recent typological proposals concerning the null subject parameter and to contribute knowledge to the comparative typology of Portuguese-based Creoles in Asia. As the general null subject rate in the corpus in focus is below 50%, the study assumes the initial hypothesis that Kristang would be a partial null subject language (D‟ALESSANDRO, 2015). To evaluate this hypothesis, and to investigate the sociolinguistic profile of null subject in this linguistic community, the study adopts the theoretical-methodological framework of Labovian Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]). Based on characteristics of null subject systems (D‟ALESSANDRO, 2015; HOLMBERG, NAYADU and SHEEHAN 2009), a set of 10 hypotheses were formulated and instrumentalized to study the variation observed in the corpus in focus. Seven of these hypotheses were confirmed as statistically relevant to the use of null subject: frequency of the previous reference to the subject, form of the previous reference, discourse function of the sentence, structural location of subject, type of verb, tense-aspect marking, and age-group of speaker. The three hypotheses not confirmed as relevant were subject person-number, conversational turn and sex of speaker.