Language in Gil Vicente

a description of clitic syntax in the Portuguese Auto Pastoril

Abstract

This paper describes the behavior of clitics in the Auto Pastoril Português and analyzes the factors that govern the placement of unstressed pronominal clitics. The Vicentine work, given the richness of the linguistic traits of its characters, constitutes a fruitful source for investigating the grammars underlying Classical Portuguese and, in this way, serves as a good source of data for continuing grammatical studies on the history of the Portuguese language. Within a generative theoretical framework, we tabulate and explain the data based on the syntactic contexts described in the literature (Galves, 2015). We attest that clitic placement in the analyzed corpus follows a proclitic pattern (77%) in root and coordinate clauses introduced by a subject, object, or prepositional phrase, whereas in coordinate clauses introduced solely by a coordinating conjunction or an adjunct clause, enclisis is attested in all occurrences (100%). This result corroborates the hypotheses of Galves (2015) and Namiuti and Cruz (2023), according to which variations in the frequencies of proclisis and enclisis are regulated by syntactic-grammatical factors rather than by social factors.