Relativization Strategies; Personal Letters; Newspapers; Pernambuco; Historical Sociolinguistics.

In his diachronic studies on the relative clauses of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Tarallo (1983, 1985) states that at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, in Portuguese, only two relativization strategies coexisted, these called standard strategy and resumptive strategy (or reminder pronoun strategy). With regard to the innovative strategy, called cutter, it emerged in BP, in the middle of the 20th century. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate the behavior of restrictive relative clauses strategies in BP, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in letters and newspapers from Pernambuco, observing the occurrences of relativization strategies in their different syntactic contexts. In addition to Tarallo's (1983, 1985) diachronic studies on relative clauses, we consider those by Ribeiro and Figueiredo (2009), Mascarenhas (2016), and others for this thesis, in which they specifically make important contributions and map relative clauses in historical texts of the past in a specific Brazilian region, in order to understand, describe and map the use of relativization strategies in texts close to the oral form of Pernambuco speech. This research, therefore, is part of the stricto sensu perspective of Historical Linguistics, the so-called Socio-historical Linguistics (Mattos & Silva, 2008) in interface with Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972), in order to observe the behavior of the three strategies of relativization found in the linguistic data of 66 letters (love, friend and family letters) and 77 newspapers from pernambucanos, totalizing 143 manuscripts and printed matter from the 19th and 20th centuries, in the latter more specifically we selected to investigate the following textual genres: editorial, reader's letter, advertisement from Pernambuco, considering that each textual genre has, in its compositional structure, traditional ways of saying and that each one corresponds to the writing of a certain period of society, serving as testimonies of the past as they come closer to face-to-face communication (Koch; Oesterreicher, 1996; Kabatek, 2006). With this, we obtained the following main results: I. greater occurrence of relative pattern both in prepositioned and non-prepositioned contexts in the 19th century in letters and newspapers; II. appearance of the resumptive in the 20th century in personal letters, especially in love letters; III. Similarly to the results of studies by Mascarenhas (2016), Ribeiro and Figueiredo (2009) and Caneiro et. Al (2022), who investigate personal letters from unskillful people, we noticed that the relativization strategies of letters and newspapers from Pernambuco obey the rules of the Accessibility Hierarchy (AH), having positions that are more sensitive to the relativization strategies SU > OD > OI > OBL > GEN > Object of Comparison, according to Comrie & Keenan (1977), adding, like the authors, Adjuncts (ADJ); IV. The frequent use of piedpiping decays over time, while the cutter appeared in the mid-20th century; V. Use of resumptive strategies in the subject position in 20th century love letters; VI. The use of relative markers que and em que which are an almost categorical majority in relative clauses; finally, VII. As Alexandre's (2000) studies on relative clauses in European Portuguese (EP) have demonstrated, in general, data of relative clauses in Pernambuco manuscripts and prints from the 19th and 20th centuries in this thesis have evidences that both educated and non-educated speakers have used the resumptive strategy more frequently and, equally, the frequency of use of relative cutters has increased. This thesis, therefore, intends to make contributions regarding the description of the varying use of relativization strategies in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which a possible change underway in BP may or may not be presented.