Paper short abstract:

This talk focuses on the strategies employed in Santomean Portuguese to deal with standard object clitics, which are almost absent from this variety, and further addresses the role of sociolinguistic variables with respect to the observed variation.

Paper long abstract:

Santomean Portuguese (STP) is the dominant L1 in São Tomé and Príncipe, as a result of L2 varieties in contact with L1 varieties of Creole and Bantu languages, with a major role for Santome, the dominant local Portuguese-related Creole.

Previous studies have shown that STP exhibits significant variation in many domains. This talk focuses on object clitics, using data from a spoken corpus of STP (240.000 words). It will be shown that STP exhibits forms that are homophonous with nominative (ele/ela; eles/elas) and dative (lhe/lhes) pronouns in accusative contexts (cf. (1-2)), together with a tendency toward the loss of third person accusative pronouns (o/a, os/as). This pattern has also been observed in Brazilian and Mozambican Portuguese. STP further exhibits the pronoun 'se' instead of direct and indirect object clitics (cf. (3-4)). This property hasn't been described for any of the African varieties of Portuguese.

We will further discuss the role of sociolinguistic variables with respect to the variation described above.

(1)Se você não atacar ela, ela não ataca você.

'If you don't attack her, she won't attack you'.

(2)Eu auxiliei-lhe a recolher elementos para tal [investigação].

'I helped him to gather elements for that [research].

(3)Levou-os para uma zona, atacou-lhe e matou-se. Matou o indivíduo.

'He took them to a place, attacked him and killed him. He killed the guy'.

(4)Em casa chamavam-se Maria.

'At home they called her Maria'.