Funciones pragmáticas en el portugués brasileño Un enfoque discursivo-funcional

This study concerns the possibilities of expressing the pragmatic functions of topic and focus on subject referents of transitive clauses in Portuguese as spoken in Brazil, compared with the European varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Spoken Brazilian Portuguese is developing an innovative topic marker for referents with subject function, which consists of the redundant use of a personal pronoun that immediately follows the subject NP, but it has only very restricted possibilities of expressing the focus function. European Portuguese lacks specific expressions for both pragmatic functions. Spanish differs from Portuguese in being able to express focus by placing the grammatical subject in clause final position; but it does not have an analogous expression of the topic function. The present paper describes the origin of the topic marker in Brazilian Portuguese, explains its functionality, and ends with a comparison of the possible expressions of topic and focus in the European varieties of the two Ibero-Romance languages and Brazilian Portuguese. The paper is concerned exclusively with transitive verbal expressions in which both arguments have third person referents.