Status of “cê” form: clitic or word?

Abstract

The fact that investigations consider ‘cê’ a syntactically clitic pronoun and the finding that this form may appear in positions in which a clitic does not occur made us question its character. Thus, based on data extracted from attested and published literature beyond constructions of the dialect from the North of Minas Gerais, Brazil, based on the Cliticization theory and Prosodic Phonology, we found out that ‘cê’ behaves not as a clitic, but as a full word. Besides, we proposed, still based on the Prosodic Phonology , that the perceived stress on ‘cê’ is at the phrase level, not at the word level. So this stress absence occurs due to the possibility of stress prominence alternance at the intonation phrase level which, due to its relation to semantic, syntactic aspects and speaker performance, determines a strong or weak node to ‘cê’, that is, its strong or weak position in the sentence.