Strong and weak personal pronoums in two languages of different modalities, Portuguese Sign Language and European Portuguese: an exploratory study

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to problematize the distinction between strong and weak personal pronouns in Portuguese Sign Language, briefly comparing this language with European Portuguese, based on a brief exploratory study of data collected in the Spread the Sign dictionary. The study shows that Portuguese Sign Language has tendentially explicit non-null subject pronouns in affirmative sentences and has strong and weak pronouns, highly dependent on the syntactic position and the syntactic types of verbs.