Animacy in the Brazilian Portuguese null object

Abstract This article focuses on one aspect of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP hereafter) direct object ellipsis. In BP animate direct objects cannot be elided when they are definite. Using feature geometry (Harley, Heidi & Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns. Language 78. 482–526) as a theoretical tool, I propose that the interaction between the features responsible for animacy and the features responsible for definiteness in the verb allow to explain such a restriction. Crucially, the organizing node class (related to animacy, and which is the main feature in the ellipsis operation) would have suffered an impoverishment in BP. This impoverishment (an operation that deletes morphosyntactic features post-syntactically) would cause that certain objects cannot be elided. The proposed interaction between animacy features and grammaticalized pragmatic features (specificity, definiteness) makes it feasible to explicitly relate the operation of nominal ellipsis to other phenomena such as differential object marking (DOM).