The verbal complement lhe in the Documentary Collection of the Regiments of Black and Mixed-race Men (1650–1793)

Abstract

This study, built upon the Master’s thesis by Paschoal (2024) defended within the Graduate Program in Linguistic Studies at the State University of Feira de Santana (PPGEL-UEFS), provides a brief synthesis of the paleographic, socio-historical, and linguistic analyses conducted on the Coleção Documental dos Terços de Homens Pretos e Pardos (CDTHPP), which comprises 28 administrative manuscripts written between 1650 and 1793 by sixteen Black men in the localities of Recife, Olinda, Salvador, and Arraial de Santa Margarida do Açu (in the present-day state of Rio Grande do Norte). The corpus consists of 3 attestations, 15 certificates, 7 official dispatches, and 3 petitions, all of which were sourced in facsimile form from the digital archives of the Projeto Resgate Barão do Rio Branco, held by the National Library of Brazil. In the socio-historical sphere, we highlight the social relations between the scriptores and the Brazilian colonial elite, considering that the Terços—institutions limited to the auxiliary bodies of the military service, as they received pay only when mobilized and were divided by social strata (white, black, mixed-race, indigenous, etc.)—represented a peak of social mobility for these Black men; this status afforded the collection a sui generis configuration, as their movement through various social layers brought them closer to Lusophone linguistic models and enabled the acquisition of literacy within the prohibitive context of slavery. To ensure the reliability of the linguistic study, the manuscripts underwent a semi-diplomatic editing process, with criteria adapted from those proposed by the Modus Scribendi research group (Federal University of Bahia) to meet the corpus's specificities. The documents were then subjected to rigorous paleographic characterization, which distinguished autograph productions—written by the signers themselves—from apographs—written by a clerk—through authorship analysis (Lose, 2022). Regarding the linguistic analysis, the use of the clitic lhe was examined to identify potential variation, considering that in Brazilian Portuguese, there is variation between the accusative and the dative, whereas in European Portuguese it remains categorically dative (Lopes et al., 2018). Nonetheless, the results demonstrate the exclusive marking of lhe as a dative by the scriptores, functioning as an indirect object in reference to the third person (singular/plural).