[PS-1.1] Usage of clitics in Brazilian Portuguese

Seid, J.

University of Hawaii at Manoa

This paper explores Brazilian Portuguese's use of clitics, which are grammatically independent morphemes in a language. A phenomenon that happens is how Brazilian Portuguese will omit their clitics, leaving a space within the sentence; this forces the listener to piece together what the clitic missing is, and what the omitted clitic was referring to. What usefulness does leaving a space have? Why create this space? This phenomenon is similar to languages that feature pronoun-dropping and is useful for further understanding language pragmatics.