EXISTENTIAL SENTENCES IN THE HISTORY OF THE PORTUGUESE FROM PERNAMBUCO

In Brazilian Portuguese, we can notice that "ser" is presented as a copula verb. However, according to Mattos e Silva (1996), in Old Portuguese, this verb competed to "haver" in sentences of an existential nature. Thus, Avelar (2004) points out that there are many syntactic similarities between these two types of structure. In this perspective, this paper aims to describe the existential sentences with "ser", observing the change and the substitution of this verb in existential contexts to "haver" and "ter" in current Brazilian Portuguese. For that, we analyzed quantitatively manuscript documents from the Century XVIII to Century XX from the state of Pernambuco. We verified, from the corpus, the nonappearance of "ser" in existential structures, which lead us to conclude that in that time in the history of Portuguese this verb had already been replaced by "haver".