The dative pronouns of 2nd person in personal letters written in Rio de Janeiro

In this paper, I analyze the dative pronoun forms of 2nd person, namely: the clitics te and lhe, the prepositional phrases a ti, para ti, a você and para você, and null object (without phonetic realization). I understand dative like the internal argument of the two or three places verbs, with thematic role of target or source and replaceable by clitic lhe. I discuss linguistic and extralinguistic factors that acted in the (dis)favoring these variants during the você diffusion period in Brazilian Portuguese, circa 1930s (DUARTE, 1995). I also describe the combination of te-dative with você-subject in constructions like “Você leu o livro que eu te dei?”. Such combination, traditionally considered as “break” the uniformity of treatment, is a construction widely accepted and no social stigma in the current BP (BRITO, 2001). The data sample is collected from 318 private letters written by people from the city of Rio de Janeiro during one century (1880-1980). I adopt the assumptions of Labovian variationist sociolinguistics (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968; LABOV, 1994) and historical sociolinguistics (CONDE SILVESTRE, 2007; HERNÀNDEX-CAMPOY; CONDE SILVESTRE, 2012).