The variation between que and o que in direct interrogative sentences in the history of the portuguese language:

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Abstract

This research investigates the variation between que and que as interrogative pronouns in direct interrogative sentences throughout the history of the Portuguese language. The objective is to find hypotheses for the emergence of what in Portuguese, as well as to analyze the syntactic and textual contexts in which this pronoun appears more frequently over time, making use of two syntactically annotated corpora, the Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe and the P.S. Post Script. Through the Corpus Search program, searches were carried out to find the prayers. Data analysis shows that the pronoun o which begins to appear only in the 17th century in direct; that the form that crystallized in some structures formed by impersonal verbs over time; and that there is no relationship between the order of subject and verb and the selection of what or what.