It is well-known that both Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) permit definite third-person null direct objects (DOs) in anaphoric contexts (Cyrino, 1998; Raposo, 1986), and that this feature distinguishes them from other Romance varieties (e.g., Spanish, Campos, 1986; but see Schwenter, 2006; Reig Alamillo, 2009 for exceptions in Spanish). Not only is there variation, however, between the null variant and overt pronominal variants, especially in conversational or informal written varieties of both BP and EP, the overt variants differ by dialect. Examples below show (1a) the null variant, frequent in both BP and EP, (1b) the clitic pronoun variant, found in EP but rare in spoken BP, and (1c) the tonic pronoun variant, found in BP but not EP.

An open question in the research on this variation is whether speakers evaluate the acceptability of the null vs. overt variants in similar fashion and moreover, whether these judgments differ across the two dialects. Are the null variants evaluated positively, even though they are not part of the prescriptive grammar of Portuguese, and are not taught in schools in either Brazil or Portugal? Are the overt variants evaluated similarly in the two dialects, even though the clitic forms are considered normative in all dialects, and the tonic forms are proscribed by the educational system in Brazil? To our knowledge, no prior research has dealt with these topics. Therefore, these are the questions we seek to answer in this paper. More generally, our research contributes to the growing body of work on native speaker evaluations in Portuguese, a language that has lagged behind as a target of this particular approach to linguistic inquiry (Oushiro, 2021).

In what follows, we first provide some necessary background on the distribution of forms found in both BP and EP for the encoding of DOs in section 2. In section 3, we detail the experimental methods employed to collect native speaker evaluations of DO realization in both Portuguese varieties. Section 4 presents the results of the experiment, including the overall distribution of the data and an inferential analysis using ordinal regression. Section 5 offers a discussion of our findings and the conclusions of our study.

In this section, we summarize the state of knowledge about anaphoric DOs in both Brazilian and European Portuguese. As we will detail, there has been quantitative research demonstrating that the distribution of the null and overt forms is very much parallel in both varieties. This claim is important for our study of speaker evaluations, since it provides the basis for the hypothesis that speakers should evaluate the different DO variants similarly across the two dialects, despite their well-known differences in the realm of DO marking (Kato, Martins, & Nunes, 2022).

In modern spoken Brazilian Portuguese, anaphoric direct objects are manifested either as null objects, i.e., as discourse referents with no overt realization, or as tonic pronouns, which coincide with the forms used for nominative subjects in both BP and EP. These uses are illustrated in the constructed examples (2) and (3), respectively.

However, in the history of BP, third-person DOs were formerly expressed as clitic pronouns o(s), -lo(s) ‘it, him, them’, and a(s), - la(s) ‘it, her, them’, a feature maintained by modern EP (in both proclitic and enclitic position). As attested by Cyrino (1994, 1998), BP underwent a diachronic change in which null DO marking became the preferred form, as shown in Table 1, where null DOs increase by nearly 70% between the 16^th and 20^th centuries.

In addition to the documentation of historical changes in the distribution of DO variants in EP and BP, previous work has also endeavored to examine the factors that constrain the variation between overt and null anaphoric DOs. In particular, several semantic and pragmatic features have been found to play key roles in the choice between null and overt DO variants in both varieties. For example, studies of both BP (Cyrino, 1994; Duarte, 1989; inter alia) and EP (Barbosa et al., 2005; Cyrino & Matos, 2002; inter alia) have found that overt objects are favored for animate referents, whereas the null option is more prevalent with inanimate referents. In addition to animacy, Cyrino (1994) found that a specific antecedent is more likely to yield the null variant than a non-specific one, thereby introducing specificity as another probabilistic determining factor in the choice of DO forms. Additionally, Creus and Menuzzi (2004)’s work on BP found that semantic gender was an important constraint on DO expression for animate referents. Namely, they found that animate referents with identifiable semantic gender (e.g., mulher, ‘woman’) are more likely to be expressed as overt pronouns than those without identifiable semantic gender (e.g., pessoa, ‘person’).

Building on the work of Cyrino (1994, 1998) and other scholars such as Duarte (1989), Schwenter and Silva (2003) demonstrated that animacy and specificity serve as the primary semantic and pragmatic factors influencing anaphoric direct object choice in Brazilian Portuguese. They extracted 1250 cases of anaphoric objects from the Programa de Estudos sobre o Uso da Língua (PEUL) corpus, which consists of sociolinguistic interviews recorded in the 1980s with speakers from lower socioeconomic classes residing in Rio de Janeiro and classified them according to animacy and specificity. Their results revealed a strong overall preference for null objects in three out of four factor combinations (animate/non-specific, inanimate/specific, and inanimate/non-specific). Conversely, overt object pronouns were favored only when the referent was animate and specific.1 The authors interpreted these results as indicative of a grammatical distinction in Brazilian Portuguese concerning animate third-person objects, specifically between specific and non-specific entities. Null objects emerge as the default choice in terms of frequency for all inanimate anaphoric DOs and animate non-specific anaphoric DOs. However, null objects assume a marked status for animate, specific anaphoric DOs, which are preferably expressed as tonic pronouns (Schwenter & Silva, 2003, p. 109). In essence, the type of anaphoric direct object marking can be anticipated probabilistically by considering the semantic and pragmatic properties of the direct object referents.

In addition to null objects, EP speakers also employ direct object pronouns (a, o, as, and os ‘it, him, her, them’) such as the proclitic Eu não o vi ‘I did not see him’ or the enclitic Eu bebi-a ontem ‘I drank it yesterday’, but never employ the tonic pronoun (e.g., ele/ela) for anaphoric DOs. In comparative terms, scholars have found syntactic differences between null direct objects in EP and BP, for instance the observation that null DOs in syntactic islands can be found in BP, but not in EP (Cyrino & Matos, 2002; Kato, 2011; Costa & Duarte, 2013). Perhaps due to this focus on the syntactic distinctions between BP and EP, much less attention has been paid to the similarities in distribution of null and overt objects in naturally occurring data from the two varieties.

This gap in the literature was at least partially filled by quantitative variationist research by Schwenter (2014) and Sainzmaza-Lecanda and Schwenter (2017), where mixed-effects logistic regression analysis was utilized to uncover the similarities between BP and EP (for other languages, Meyerhoff, 2002; Vallejos et al., 2020). In these two works, naturally-occurring spoken data from both varieties—the PEUL corpus data described above for BP, and the oral portion of the Corpus de Referência do Português Contemporâneo2 for EP—were analyzed in order to test the hypothesis that the underlying constraints on the variable use of null versus overt forms are similar in the two varieties of Portuguese. Sainzmaza-Lecanda and Schwenter (2017) found that the constraint types and their ordering in the two dialects are nearly identical despite the obvious difference in the pronominal forms employed for third-person referents across dialects: clitic (EP) versus tonic (BP). Their findings showed that the null object was the most frequent option for direct objects in both dialects, although there were more null objects in BP (and more repetition of lexical NPs in EP; see Schwenter, 2014 for explanation). The null variant in each dialect corresponded to direct objects with the prototypical semantic and pragmatic features (inanimate, non-specific) of this grammatical function. At the same time, overt forms (clitic or tonic) were employed to mark DOs with features atypical of this grammatical function (Comrie, 1989), that is, those that are animate and specific3. Sainzmaza-Lecanda and Schwenter (2017) concluded, based on the results of their regression analyses, that the tonic pronoun forms (deriving from the nominative subject pronoun) in BP are the forms that have replaced the clitic forms still found in modern-day EP and that the distribution of these two types of pronouns essentially mirrored each other across the two dialects.

However, an open question in research on DOs in Portuguese is whether speakers evaluate the acceptability of null forms vis-à-vis their overt pronominal counterparts in a positive fashion and what semantic and pragmatic factors affect their judgments. While overt forms are either prescribed (clitic pronouns) or proscribed (tonic pronouns) in formal schooling, little attention has been paid to null objects in the educational system (they are not found as an option for DOs, for instance, in pedagogical grammars for native speakers). Furthermore, an additional question is whether, given the similarity in usage constraints across EP and BP, speakers of the two dialects also show parallel judgments in their acceptance of the different forms. In other words, if the distinct forms in BP and EP, including null objects, are essentially serving the same purpose/function, then we predict that speaker evaluations of them in the same contexts should also be essentially the same. If BP speakers and EP speakers show similar gradient judgments for the anaphoric DO variation, and they also show the same judgments for null objects, then it would be reasonable to conclude that their underlying grammars of DO realization are similar, despite the formal difference between the pronouns utilized in each variety.

The overall results of the experimental task show that animacy and specificity are significant predictors of respondent evaluation of third-person DO variants in both EP and BP. In both cases, the use of the null variant is evaluated more favorably overall, when compared to clitic pronouns in EP and tonic pronouns in BP. Nevertheless, the two language varieties present some differences with the regard to the influence of animacy and specificity in the evaluation of DO variants. Specifically, evaluations of both null and clitic variants in EP are constrained by animacy and specificity of the referent, while in BP only evaluations of tonic pronouns are mediated by these factors. We did not find effects of semantic gender for animate referents or effects related to the demographic characteristics of our participants in the present data sets. The following sections detail the individual analyses of the evaluation of third-person null versus overt DOs in EP and BP, respectively.6

The data presented in this article reveal several important trends which provide additional insight into what are ultimately coherent patterns of DO evaluation in EP and BP, despite the obvious differences in the form of the overt variant employed in each dialect. Not only do we find parallels between both varieties in terms of constraints on evaluation of DO variants, but we also corroborate previous findings from analyses of naturally occurring data (Sainzmaza-Lecanda & Schwenter, 2017), demonstrating that the same predictors that operate in language production are also present in BP and EP speakers’ perception and evaluation of DO variants.

Beginning with the null variant, our findings align with previous studies of DO use in naturally occurring language production, which found the null variant to be overwhelmingly more frequent in both EP and BP (Schwenter, 2014; Sainzmaza-Lecanda & Schwenter, 2017). Similarly, our evaluative data reveal that speakers of both EP and BP show a marked preference for null forms compared to their overt counterparts, consistently evaluating them in more positive fashion. Looking only at evaluations of the null variants, there were some small differences. In EP, neither the combination of null DO with an animate, non-specific referent, nor the combination of null DO with an inanimate, specific referent, were evaluated significantly differently than the use of a null DO with a referent that was both inanimate and non-specific. This suggests that while null DOs with inanimate and non-specific referents are evaluated positively, only one of these features is necessary for speakers to evaluate the null variant as natural. One possible explanation for this is that many studies have demonstrated that the most frequent, “default” linguistic structures tend to be less pragmatically constrained, are “felt to be more usual, more normal, less specific” than other competing forms (Dahl, 1985, p. 19; cf. Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008), and are often the zero-coded form, as is the case in this study. Thus, this tendency is consistent with our results in which EP speakers positively evaluate null DOs with fewer feature requirements than the overt variant.

This is particularly evident in BP, where only the combination of a null DO with an inanimate, specific referent, was not evaluated significantly differently compared to the use of a null DO with a referent that was both inanimate and non-specific. In contrast to EP, BP speakers evaluated the use of the null variant with an animate, non-specific referent as significantly less acceptable than with inanimate, specific referents, suggesting the greater importance of animacy for null variants in this variety. Nevertheless, the coherence between patterns of use of null objects in both varieties and their evaluation by speakers illustrate that BP and EP have extremely similar underlying usage-based tendencies. This finding is of special import because it reveals that Brazilian Portuguese maintains pragmatic constraints in the domain of DO coding that are similar to those of EP despite clear diachronic changes in the BP system (Cyrino, 1994), thereby adding to the accepted idea in usage-based models of grammar that language change is gradual, and correspondingly, evaluations are probabilistic (Bybee, 2009).

Regarding the evaluation of the overt variants in EP and BP, several compelling findings emerged from our data. First, animacy and specificity played a role in the evaluation of overt DOs in both varieties. In both EP and BP, the overt variants were evaluated most positively with animate, specific referents. Critically, our data provide an evaluative complement to Schwenter’s (2014) and Sainzmaza-Lecanda & Schwenter’s (2017) assertions that tonic pronouns in BP are this variety’s replacement of the third-person direct object clitic pronouns in EP. Other than that, these results also contribute to the concept of the dynamicity of language change (Bybee, 2010), meaning that, even though tonic pronouns are supplanting BP’s former clitics, this new pronominal option has conserved the same referential features expressed by the clitics. Therefore, based on these findings, it is possible to claim that as the overt variant was (is) more frequently used in BP, it conventionally assumed (and continues to assume) the former clitic pronoun properties that are still conserved in EP.

Overall, our findings show that the patterns of variation previously found in anaphoric DOs in conversational production in EP and BP are reflected in gradient evaluations in an experimental task. In addition to this contribution, our results have also suggested some possible paths of change regarding Brazilian Portuguese’s shift from clitic to tonic DO pronouns, in which we argue that it is possible that the overt variant could have preferentially taken on the same properties of the clitic DOs that are now extremely rare in this dialect. Furthermore, other than the differences found between overt and clitic evaluations, our results have indicated that the preferred strategy overall in both dialects was the null variant. Following our results, the null variant seems to be less pragmatically constrained in EP than in BP, considering that only one of the tested referent’s features is necessary for speakers to evaluate the null variant as acceptable in the contexts we tested. However, future studies could test this hypothesis in greater depth with a broader range of contextual cues, across these and other Portuguese varieties.