A elipse do sujeito pronominal “eu” em um corpus comparável de Monteiro Lobato

Abstract

This research is set in the academic discipline of Translation Studies and – concerning its theoretical-methodological trait – in Corpus Linguistics. This paper aims to conduct a quantitative analysis of the explicit use of the Portuguese pronoun eu – in cases traditional grammarians consider it the subject of a verb – in contrast with its ellipsis. A comparable corpus was used comprising two texts in Portuguese language: Caçadas de Pedrinho (1933), by the Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato, and Aventuras de Huck (1934), Monteiro Lobato's translation into Portuguese of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), by the American writer Mark Twain. Because the corpus used is comparable, by relying on the theory of Baker (1998), this work analyzes both texts in Portuguese and does not look up the source text in English. This research is quantitative and its methodology is based on the work of Maia (1998). Electronic data were processed through the freeware Concordancer AntConc. Considering the occurrences of a selection of two verbs marked for the 1st person singular in both texts (total of four cases), in all four cases the results obtained from this corpus show numerical superiority of the ellipsis of the personal pronoun eu when used as a subject when compared with its explicit use. Among the occurrences of two unmarked verbs in both texts (total of four cases), only in one case was the ellipsis quantitatively superior.