Sobre algumas consequências do enfraquecimento da categoria concordância no português brasileiro

This article expands the ideas discussed during the IV International Conference about teaching Brazilian Portuguese in the Italian University (December, 2021) and the International Conference that celebrated the Day of the Portuguese Language (May, 2022). Three main issues will be addressed: the origin of the large gap between speech and writing in Brazilian Portuguese and the consequences of the adoption of an exonormative model of written language, ignoring the written language already in development in Brazil along the 19th Century; some important features of spoken Brazilian grammar resulting from the contact with other languages during colonization, particularly the African slaves and their descendants, and other features related to successive processes of changes; and some aspects that characterize contemporary Brazilian writing as a result of the recovery of lost features by the action of a conservative perspective and the implementation of Brazilian speech features. The discrepancy between use and prescription gives rise to structures that belong neither to European nor to Brazilian grammars. Besides questions related to the social history of Brazilian Portuguese, this article relates the emergence of some structures to the reduction of the category Agreement, including not only number and person verbal endings but the non-deictic clitics: the indefinite se, and the anaphoric accusative and dative clitics, not available in acquisition data, contrary to deictic me, te, clitics, treated as overt pronouns (Noun Phrases), following Galves (2019) and extending Nunes's 2019 analysis for the accusative 3rd person clitic as agreement of object. The simplified category Agr gives rise to overt subjects, null complements, constructions that suggest topic prominence, such as left-dislocated subjects, genitive and locative raising in impersonal sentences, among others. A successful teaching of Portuguese claims for a good description of contemporary writing, showing its face, so distant from idealized models still adopted.