TE and LHE as accusative forms of 2nd person in personal letters of Ceará, Brazil

This study analyzes the alternation of pronouns te and lhe for the 2nd person, in the function of accusative in personal letters written in Brazilian Portuguese during the 20th century, in the light of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972; 1994). The sample to be analyzed consists of 186 personal letters written by people from the state of Ceará. The aim is to investigate the performance of groups of factors: semantic type of the verb; structure of the verb; position of the clitic, in addition to extra-linguistic variable decade in which the letters were written. Data were submitted to the computer program GoldVarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005) and indicate that a) as accusative of 2nd person, the form te (60%) is more recurrent than the form lhe (40%); b) dicendi verbs favour the use of lhe (68%), while verbs of feeling disfavor it (12%); c) in the enclises, lhe was most common (60%) than te (40%); and d) the te~lheaccusative variation was more balanced in the first two periods analyzed, with a much greater use of te (70%) in the last period (1980-1999).