Abstract
The varieties of Portuguese spoken in Madeira present a predominant use of a gente, a grammaticalized first person plural pronoun, derived from the noun phrase ‘the people’, instead of the traditional pronoun nós. They also exhibit constructions where a gente cooccurs with the impersonal clitic se. In a pioneering study, Martins (2009) provides a detailed description of what she calls “double subject impersonal constructions” and proposes that a gente restricts the generic interpretation of the clitic se. Based on spoken data from semi-directed interviews and free-speech conversations with elderly speakers of rural Madeiran Portuguese, this chapter provides a quantitative and qualitative approach to the [(a gente) + se] construction.
The goal of this study is twofold. First, a depiction of the broad referential range of this hybrid structure is presented. Its possible interpretations cover a scope similar to that of first person plural pronouns reaching from indefinite readings to deictic ones (referring to participants of the speech act). Second, a description of the syntactic features of this innovative construction will show that the element se is being reanalyzed as a dependent person marker in rural Madeiran Portuguese varieties.
Henriques Pestana, Yoselin