Sobre o expletivo ele em português europeu

• Main Author: Ernestina Carrilho
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 2009-01-01
• Series: Estudos de Linguistica Galega
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=305626315001

This paper examines the syntactic status of expletive ele in European Portuguese (EP). This expletive, which can be found in EP non-standard varieties, has traditionally been analyzed as an instance of the subject in impersonal constructions (in examples like Ele há cada uma! ‘There are such things!’), in sharp contrast to what is expected in a null subject language. Occasionally, alternative analyses have suggested a particular connection between this kind of expletive element and the structural space beyond the subject position, more specifi cally the left periphery of the sentence structure. The present study aims at elucidating the status of expletive ele in EP, on the basis of the syntactic properties and the discourse effects displayed by expletive constructions in a corpus of EP dialects, summarizing part of the research developed in Carrilho (2005). Such empirical evidence favors an analysis of expletive ele as a non-subject element, further motivating the proposal that this expletive relates to the codifi cation of specifi c discourse features, especially in connection with illocutionary force.