A pessoa and uma pessoa: Grammaticalization and functions of a human impersonal referential device in European Portuguese

The grammaticalization of nouns meaning ‘man’ or ‘person’ into impersonal pronouns (so-called man-impersonals) has been related to languages with obligatory subject expression, like Germanic and French. Albeit regarded as a null-subject language, European Portuguese (EP) presents similar development: the noun phrases uma pessoa ‘a person’ a ‘the are used in ways that resembles man-impersonals. present paper aims at shedding light semantics, pragmatics morphosyntactic properties pessoa constructions EP discuss their status potentially grammaticalized grammaticalizing referential devices. It is argued emergence these favored by pragmatic tendencies found EP: avoidance direct person reference preference for expressed subjects even contexts permitting null subjects.