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Article published In: Romance Parsed Corpora
Edited by Christina Tortora, Beatrice Santorini and Frances Blanchette
[Linguistic Variation 18:1] 2018
► pp. 49–73

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Special issue articles

The Tycho Brahe Corpus of Historical Portuguese

Methodology and results

 | University of Campinas
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00004.gal
Abstract
This article introduces the Tycho Brahe Corpus (TBC), a parsed corpus of Historical Portuguese built on the model of the Penn-York Corpora of English. As an illustration of the usefulness of the TBC, the article presents research on the evolution of the position and interpretation of subjects in Portuguese from the 16th to the 19th century. Two main claims emerge, in response to questions that have largely remained unanswered until now, due to the paucity of available data. One is that the texts of the classical period instantiate verb-movement to Comp in matrix clauses, reflecting a V2 grammar. The other is that quantitative and qualitative changes appearing in the texts of the authors born from the beginning of the 18th century on indicate that, at this period, verb-movement to Comp was lost and the modern SVO grammar emerged.
Article outline
  • 1.The Tycho Brahe Corpus of Historical Portuguese
  • 2.The position of subjects in the history of Portuguese (16c.–19c.)
  • 3.Big questions for a big corpus: Classical Portuguese as a V2 language
    • 3.1Preliminary notes on the V1 and V3 orders
    • 3.2What are the fundamental (abstract) properties of V2 languages?
      • 3.2.1Evidence for high post-verbal subjects in Classical Portuguese
    • 3.3Movement of a phrase to Spec/CP
  • 4.The loss of V-to-C in the history of portuguese
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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