Third-Person Anaphoric Direct Objects: The Accusative Clitic in the Spoken Language of Caxias, Maranhão

Resumo

This article, part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation, analyzes the use of the accusative clitic as a strategy for resuming third-person anaphoric direct objects with nominal antecedents in the speech of Caxias, Maranhão, considering its frequency, social distribution, and linguistic-discursive contexts. The study is grounded in Variationist Sociolinguistics, in Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (2006 [1968]) concept of orderly heterogeneity and in Labov’s (2008 [1972]) assumption that linguistic variation is systematic and conditioned by internal and external factors. As empirical background, it draws on Pinto (2015), Lima (2016), Lauar (2022), and Santana (2025), whose findings indicate the low productivity or absence of the accusative clitic in Brazilian speech communities. Methodologically, this is a basic, documentary, quantitative, and descriptive-explanatory study combined with qualitative analysis. The corpus comprises 72 sociolinguistic interviews from the Atitudes Linguísticas dos Falantes do Maranhão (ALFMA) database, yielding 1,065 occurrences of third-person anaphoric direct objects with nominal antecedents. Only six involved accusative clitics (0.6%), which precluded multivariate analysis. Occurrences concentrated among four speakers with secondary or higher education, within the two younger age groups, and predominantly among men. All antecedents resumed were human; morphosyntactically, three enclitic forms occurred with infinitives and three proclitic forms with finite verbs. The accusative clitic is residual, socially restricted, and discursively circumscribed in the sample, not a productive vernacular strategy, though it remains available for occasional use.