As pessoas, a quasi-pronominal human impersonal construction in European Portuguese?

Abstract

The grammaticalization of nouns meaning ‘man’ or ‘person’ into impersonal pronouns is a well-documented phenomenon found across the world. In Europe, such impersonal pronouns are characteristic of languages with obligatory subject expression like Germanic languages and French (Siewierska, 2011). However, European (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) also display impersonal uses of noun phrases with the lexeme pessoa ‘person’ as recently discussed by Posio (2017, 2021) and Amaral and Mihatsch (2019, forthcoming). The present paper analyses the use of the plural form as pessoas ‘the people’ in a sociolinguistic interview corpus of spoken EP, comparing it with similar data from Peninsular Spanish (Fernández Juncal, 2005) and with dialectal data from the CORDIAL-SIN corpus (Martins, 2000–). In terms of frequency, as pessoas occurs over 30 times per 10,000 words in the EP interview data, in contrast to just over 3 occurrences in the CORDIAL-SIN and less than one occurrence of the cognate las personas in the Spanish data. In addition to discussing the high token frequency and other properties associated with grammaticalization, the paper examines the referential and quantificational properties of a gente and explores the hypothesis that as pessoas might be a sociolinguistically conditioned alternative for the impersonal pronoun a gente ‘people; us’, considered ‘popular’ in normative EP. However, this hypothesis is not supported by the data: while sociolinguistic factors do affect the frequency of use of a gente and as pessoas, the two forms are functionally different in that a gente typically includes the speaker in its referential range and as pessoas implies a speaker-exclusive reading.