THE ACQUISITION OF THE INDETERMINATE AND PASSIVE SE CLITIC IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: OUTCOMES OF AN ACQUISITION THROUGH WRITING

Kato, Cyrino & Correa (2009), discussing the distance between written and spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP), show that the school system tends to recover certain stylistic features of 19th Century Portuguese grammar. Those features are treated as grammatical fossils by the authors. Amongst them, we can find the indeterminate and passive clitic se. This research examines the acquisition of such clitic, mainly by highly educated speakers of BP. One of its goals is to see to what extent the se clitic is acquired as a second language (L2) grammar, as Kato (2005a) has proposed. To achieve that, we examine different proposals for L2 acquisition and also the diachronic changes involving the clitic, focusing on its present syntactic status. Our results support her proposal. We have analyzed five different corpora, one for each stage in the acquisition of written BP. Our results show that the indeterminate interpretation overruled the passive one, becoming the preferred form. They also show that the acquisition of the se clitic is dependent on schooling.