Clitic Attachment in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Teaching and learning the placement of clitics in Brazilian Portuguese is a challenge, especially in written language, because of the many rules of clitic placement that characterize Portuguese normative grammars. These normative rules are applied more uniformly in Portugal than in Brazil because they were based originally on Peninsular Portuguese prosody. But regardless of how uniform they may be in Portugal, normative rules of clitic placement are a challenge to non-native speakers of Portuguese. The present study proposes a simplified approach to teaching normative rules to non-native students of Brazilian Portuguese, in the written and spoken language alike, based on a single rule of pronoun attachment.