Variation in the paradigms of tu and você Subject and complements in letters from Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1860–1989

: This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of the use of Portuguese second person singular (2SG) address pronouns tu and você in correlation with second person verbal complements ( te , a ti , prep. + ti , você , a você , para você , prep. + você , lhe , o / a , zero (Ø)). We analyse the diversity of 2SG verbal complements in accusative, dative and oblique structures in letters written by individuals from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 1860 and 1989. The results show that oblique verbal complementation functions as a syntactic context that tends to favor the use of você (Rumeu & Oliveira 2016), whereas the dative and accusative functions are seen as survival contexts for the clitic pronominal te .


Introduction
In present-day Brazil, the pronominal forms tu and você coexist as forms of the second person singular (2SG) subject. These pronominal forms are distributed geographically in six subsystems of address forms (see Scherre et al. 2015), and also throughout the dynamics of social relations. The six subsystems currently used in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as described by Scherre et al. (2015) can be further reduced to three subsystems, if subject-verb agreement is not taken into consideration (see Lopes & Cavalcante 2011). Você (also present in the variant forms ocê and ce)1 is the dominant 2SG form in the city of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Given that historically você was introduced later than tu, the present study tackles the question of how this layering process was realised over time, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, the subsequent layering in dependent functions such as direct and indirect object will also be studied. A corpus of letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais during the 19th and 20th centuries provides the data for an investigation of the functional potential of new pronominal forms of the você paradigm (prep. + você, você, lhe, o/a) co-related to the você and to the tu paradigms (prep. + ti, te). Given that the arrival of você in the BP address system did not take place to the same degree in all morphosyntactic contexts (see Lopes et al. 2009), this study analyses the diversity of forms of verbal complementation of the 2SG that occur in accusative, dative and oblique contexts of verbal complementation for the period between 1860 and 1989. This chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 summarises the history of the emergence of você in the pronominal system of BP. Section 3 gives an overview of the criteria used to identify accusative, dative and oblique structures of verbal complementation. Section 4 describes the corpus of letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais representative of the evolution of address forms in BP. Section 5 discusses the results of the correlation between the tu/você forms functioning as subjects and the 2SG complement pronouns in the corpus. The conclusion summarises the study's findings on the use of 2SG pronominal forms in verbal complementation contexts (accusative, dative and oblique).

The emergence of você in the pronominal system of BP
Analyses of tu/você alternation between the 18th and 20th centuries have been based on different types of text. These include letters (Rumeu 2004;Lopes & Machado 2005;Barcia 2006;Lopes & Cavalcante 2011;Pereira 2012;Silva 2012;Rumeu 2013), notes (Lopes, Marcotulio & Rumeu 2011), theatre plays (Lopes & Duarte 2003;Machado 2006Machado , 2011 and movie scripts (Lopes, Couto & Duarte 2005). These studies have provided evidence that você, which originated from the grammaticalisation of vossa mercê 'your grace', primarily took on the functions of subject and complement in the pronominal system of BP. Furthermore, the second quarter of the 20th century, more specifically between 1925 and 1945, was the period when você became the most productive, as it took over the 2SG subject function (see Rumeu 2013: 278). Based on letters written by individuals from the city of Rio de Janeiro (carioca) and exchanged during the 19th and 20th centuries , Souza (2012: 90) mapped the emergence of você in BP's pronominal system, identifying three clear phases in this process. By the end of the 19th century (1870-1890, phase 1), the pronoun tu, which denoted intimacy, was more productive than the form você. The latter maintained the semantics of distance/formality, which is typical of its origins in the formal vossa mercê as observed by Rumeu (2013). The turn of the century (1900-1930, phase 2) represents a transitional period: as the pronoun você began to compete for the same functional space as tu, its use extended to relations characterised by informality. From 1940From onwards (1940From -1970 3), the pronoun tu took the opposite direction to that observed at the end of the 19th century, as você began to prevail and tu fell into disuse. The widespread use of você forced the desemanticisation or bleaching of the term, that is, the loss of distance/formality. This led to a neutral form of address, which neither showed distance nor specified intimacy, at least within the scope of the city of Rio de Janeiro society between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (see Souza 2012;Rumeu 2013).
The starting point of the present analysis is the proposal of Scherre et al. (2015) regarding the synchronic productivity of the six subsystems of 2SG subject address forms in current BP, reduced by Lopes & Cavalcante (2011: 39) (7) and (8). Verbal predicates which govern address forms are indicated in bold while the pronouns that accompany them are presented in italics.

2SG pronominal forms in accusative, dative and oblique verbal complements
This section focuses on describing the pronominal forms of the você and tu paradigms used in verbal complementation in the accusative (direct object of the verb), dative (indirect object of the verb, whether or not preceded by a preposition) and oblique functions (a non-cliticisable prepositional complement).

The accusative (direct) object
The accusative (direct) object appears in a verbal predicate with two arguments, that is, subject and direct object (direct transitive verb [SU V DO]), three arguments ([SU V DO OBL COMPL ] and ditransitive [SU V DO IO]).3 From a formal perspective, the accusative verbal complement represents the formally cliticisable 2SG direct object in atonic pronominal forms in the tu (te) and você (o/a, lhe) paradigms. Semantically, the accusative takes the thematic role of a patient or theme. From the perspective of the grammatical tradition, the complement pronoun te is the only form to comply with the subject pronoun tu, in agreement with a uniform address. However, the emergence of você as subject pronoun in the BP pronominal system led to a confusion of paradigms characterised by the coexistence of forms of the tu (te) paradigm alongside forms of the você (o/a,4 lhe) paradigm, as well as by the absence of the direct object (Ø = null 2SG direct object) and by the use of 3rd person possessives linked to você, e.g. seu. Evidence of accusative pronominal 2SG forms are illustrated in examples (9)

The dative (indirect) object
The dative encompasses syntactic constructions traditionally identified as indirect object. These are so named because they are indirectly linked to a verb through a preposition. In the present study, the dative grammatical relation is interpreted as a term which takes a preposition; it is clitisable as lhe, and appears in a verbal predicate with two arguments (indirect transitive verbs -[SU V IO]), or three arguments (ditransitive verbs [SU V DO IO]), see Duarte (2006: 296, 298-299), which refer to the target, the source or the beneficiary of the action with the semantic feature [+animate]. Examples (14) and (15)

The oblique (prepositional) object
The oblique form is syntactically linked to a verbal predicate in the form of a (non-cliticisable) non-dative prepositional phrase, e.g. comtigo 'with you (tu)'. Following Duarte & Brito (2006: 169-170), the oblique is interpreted as the argument that, when linked to a verbal predicate in the form of a non-dative prepositional phrase, is a complement to the verbal predicate in a nuclear (nuclear oblique) or optional form (non-nuclear oblique).6 The latter is projected as an adjunct, while the former is projected as a complement, as discussed by Rumeu & Oliveira (2016), Cruz (2017) following the works of Duarte & Brito (2016) and Ilari et al. (2015). Examples (21) to (24)  The following section will proceed with the description of historical samples of correspondence written by individuals from the state of Minas Gerais (19th and 20th centuries).

Analysing the samples of historical correspondence and the informants
Human languages follow a dynamic of ordered heterogeneity from which linguistic manifestations can be described and analysed from a structural and social perspective (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968;Labov 1994). If the objective is to reconstruct linguistic realities of past synchronies, it is important to bear in mind the possible obstacles to working with historical data, such as those related to the authorship as well as the historical and social validity of historical texts. This has led to the construction of a specific methodology for approaching historical corpora (see Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre 2014; Conde-Silvestre 2007). The present study is based on the analysis of two hundred thirty-four personal handwritten letters from the period 1869 to 1989, by individuals born in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. These letters reveal the intimacy of love, family, and friendship relationships, see Table 1, through social relations that are informed by various degrees of affective proximity between the sender and the receiver.

Love letters 04
Family letters 127

Friendship letters 103
The corpus consists of love, family and friendship letters written by JPS,7 a wellknown political figure in Minas Gerais, and were produced between 1869 and 1908. The love letters were exchanged between him and his wife H. He also wrote to his uncle (family letters) and other authorities of the state's political scene (friendship letters) (see Luz 2015). There are also letters exchanged by the AP family, dating from 1907 to 1944. The letters were directed to the priest A., and were written by the parents, siblings, a (female) cousin, and a brother-in-law. This correspondence is characterised by a sense of proximity amongst family members. We know that the family members were from Minas Gerais because their biographical details were reconstructed from the letters. Particularly with regard to the father and the brother (the men of the AP family), it is known that they were educated informants as one was a professor of languages and the other a professor of medical pathologies. The intimacy of family relations allows them to express how they miss one another (saudades), to exchange news (notícias) and to make the most varied requests. In addition, the corpus contains letters written by local poets between 1917 and 1989, which illustrate relations of friendship and family ties. With the goal of constructing an historical sociolinguistics of BP, a set of methodological steps have been adopted. They work as premises to confirm the authorship and historical and social validity of the letters written by well-known or public figures from Minas Gerais. The steps are as follows: (i) the reconstruction of the social profile of the letter writers, based on the identification of their origin (nationality and place of birth), gender (sex), age group, schooling background, and social role; (ii) the comparison of various letters written by the same person, enabling us to determine the respective authorship of the handwritten letters (love, friendship and family related); (iii) the conservative editing of letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais, which consists of the facsimile reproduction and transcription of the manuscripts without any intervention by the editor with regards to spelling, punctuation or other textual practices specific to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Following the presentation of these historical samples with regards to writers from Minas Gerais and the subtypes of personal letters (love, family and friendship related), we proceed to the analytical description of accusative, dative and oblique 2SG contexts linked to the subject pronouns tu and você.

Accusative, dative and oblique 2SG verbal complements used with tu and você
As we have seen, pronominal variant forms of the tu and você paradigms can be used in accusative, dative and oblique 2SG contexts in BP. The letters in the corpus were controlled for pronouns used in the subject function and for pronouns used in the verbal complement function, as well as for variant forms of the 2SG paradigms. The goal was to quantify the use of variant pronominal forms from the tu and você paradigms in accusative, dative, and oblique verbal complement structures, and to discover whether these pronominal forms matched the use of tu or você in subject position.

The accusative (direct) object
The results show that among the pronominal forms used in the accusative function (present in 26/436 or five per cent of the letters analysed), te was the one most frequently used, with levels varying between 80 and 97 per cent of the letters. Te shares its functional space mainly with the clitic accusative form o/a, which also had productivity levels of over 70 per cent. Figure 1 presents the distribution of accusative pronominal forms in relation to each specific pronoun used in 2SG subject function (tu-only letters, você-only letters and mixed-tu/você letters).
The te form is predominant in tu-only missives as well as in letters with mixed-tu/você in subject position, as illustrated in examples (25) and (26). These results confirm those of other studies that show that the use of tu and você is identical in relation to the semantic person they refer to ([-EU]8 = 2SG) (Lopes & Rumeu 2007;Rumeu 2006). Conversely, however, in letters with você as the exclusive subject, the direct object clitic o/a is prevalent in 76 per cent of the data in reference to 2SG, as illustrated by examples (27) and (28). Given that the accusative clitic o/a was etymologically geared towards 3SG, its use in reference to 2SG seems to constitute an innovation in BP, which was already evident in the writing of educated individuals from the state of Minas Gerais between the 19th and 20th centuries.
(25) Tu as exclusive subject: Fazendo-lhe uma visitinha muito afetuosa venho convida-la para assistir à festinha da entrega dos diplomas no próximo dia 30. Terei muito gôsto que você venha. (CLB. Lambari, 25.11.1941) 'Paying you [-lhe] a short and very affectionate visit, I hereby invite you [-la] to attend the little party in which we will handle the diplomas on 30th. I will be very pleased should you [você] come' In relation to the context of letters using only você, the forms te, lhe and você as direct complements occurred less frequently -see examples (29) to (32). In the original example, it is possible to see evidence of the accusative a você in a redoubling structure already present in Minas Gerais writing from the late 19th century. This structure is productive in contemporary Minas Gerais spoken language, as shown by the following examples from Duarte & Diniz (2012: 92). Eu vou te i levá ocê i lá 'I will take you, take you, there'. Uma coisa eu vou te i falá com ocê i 'I will tell you something to you'. Eu vou te i contá pro ocê i um pouquim da minha vida 'I will tell you something to you a bit about my life'.

The dative (indirect) object
In dative verbal complements (328/436, 77 per cent of the samples), te shares its functional contexts with the clitic lhe, as well as with the prepositional phrase a você and para você. The clitics te and lhe are the most frequently used verbal complement pronominal forms. Figure 2 presents the distribution of these pronominal forms across the subsystems of forms of address in tu-only letters, você-only letters, and mixed-tu/você letters. Generally speaking, the dative form -te is predominant not only in the tu-only letters (82 per cent, 80 occurrences), but also in mixed-tu/você letters (63 per cent, 17 occurrences), as illustrated by examples (35) and (36). On the other hand, lhe is the preferred strategy (75 per cent, 152 occurrences) in você-only letters, as illustrated by examples (37) and (38). The phrases preceded by prepositions a você, para você, the clitics te and zero (Ø), in turn, are present in the you-subject letters with low levels of productivity (8.3 per cent, 5.4 per cent, 5.4 per cent, and 5.9 per cent, respectively). In short, the você-only context seems to boost the use of the lhe -dative, while the tu-only letters and the você-only letters are productive contexts for the te-dative in letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais. The coexistence of forms of the tu (te) paradigm and forms of the você (você, lhe and o/a) paradigm, as in example (36), is yet another indication of the fusion of second and third person paradigms since the emergence of você in the BP pronominal system.

The oblique (prepositional) object
In oblique verbal complements (82/436, 18 per cent), pronominal phrases preceded by a preposition (prep. + ti and prep. + você) had the highest levels of productivity in the contexts of the tu-only and você-only letters, respectively. This illustrates a symmetry between the pronominal choices used in the 2SG subject and verbal complement positions. Figure 3 reveals that the subject pronoun seems to determine the oblique 2SG pronominal form, replicating the patterns observed in the accusative and oblique 2SG structures. Consequently, we can assert that the forms that follow a preposition, prep. + ti and prep. + você, are predominant in tu-only letters and in você-only letters, respectively, as illustrated in examples (39) and (40).  Oblique forms structured with the innovative use of você (as in prep. + você) have a slight advantage (over prep. + ti), which describes the oblique grammatical relation as a more favourable context for pronominal forms than the você paradigm. This can be observed in example (41), which shows para você in a letter with você as the sole subject pronoun.
(41) Você as exclusive subject: H., Quebro para Você o meu habito carranca de não felicitar qualquer, por motivo nenhum […] a nave que você pilota ha de erguer vôo seguro elevando você às alturas onde quizer ficar. (JLJ. Lambari, 23.10.1924) 'H., for You (para Você) I would even dispose of my grumpy custom of congratulating no-one, for whichever reason […] the ship you pilot will certainly take off safely, raising you [você] to the heights where you [você] want to be' In the letters where tu and você coexist in the subject function, the variant form of the você paradigm, prep. + você, is evident in example (42), although coexisting

Conclusion
After the analysis of the forms te, a ti, prep. + ti, a você, para você, prep. + você, lhe, o/a, zero (Ø) in verbal complement structures, it is possible to make some brief generalisations about the use of these pronouns in accusative, datives and oblique structures in letters with tu-only used in subject position, você-only, and mixed-tu/você. Accusative pronominal forms diachronically follow their respective nominative forms, since it was shown that the clitics te and o/a (corresponding to the pronominal forms of the paradigms tu and você) are predominant in the tu-only and você-only letters respectively. In letters where the pronouns tu and você alternate as subject, accusative te also prevails. This indicates the neutral character that the clitic te has acquired (see the debate by Oliveira 2014 and Cruz 2017 in relation to letters from the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, respectively).
As for 2SG dative structures, pronominal forms also follow their respective nominative options. This is shown by the prevalence of te (dative) in tu-only missives and of lhe (dative) in você-only letters. The absence of pronominal forms in 2SG dative structures (zero dative) occurred infrequently, regardless of the pronoun used in the nominative function. On the other hand, the forms para você and a você in dative structures are evident in limited numbers: contexts of você-only and mixed-tu/você letters. In short, te -the pronominal form of the tu paradigm -persists in the accusative and dative structures of tu-only letters and mixed-tu/você letters (see Lopes & Cavalcante 2011;Oliveira 2014;Souza 2014;Cardoso 2017).
Two specific characteristics of letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais are related to the fact that lhe (originally the third person dative clitic) functioned in dative structures with 2SG reference. This is evidence of the high level of formality between the writers, but also of the innovative role of the clitic o/a (originally the third person accusative clitic) in 2SG accusative structures.
As was also observed for accusative and dative structures, oblique structures are guided by the nominative forms (tu subject → prep. + ti; você subject → prep. + você). The variant form prep. + você is highly productive in oblique structures in the você-only letters.
To sum up, these results confirm the hypothesis that the emergence of você in the pronominal system of BP has not reached all syntactic contexts to the same degree (Lopes et al. 2009). In the letters written by individuals from Minas Gerais in the 19th and 20th centuries, the oblique grammatical relation of the verbal complement favours the diffusion of você (Rumeu & Oliveira 2016), while the dative and accusative grammatical relations are the syntactic contexts where the tu is maintained, consolidated through the high productivity of the clitic te.