AgradecimentosAo meu orientador, o Prof. Dr. Ronald Beline Mendes, pela orientação cuidadosa e minuciosa desde minha Iniciação Científica, pelo incentivo a prosseguir com os estudos acadêmicos diante das adversidades da vida, pela atenção e paciência ao longo desses anos.Ao CNPq, agência que financiou este estudo. Ao Kiko, pelo companheirismo... um serzinho muito especial, que me prova a cada dia que "ser humano" não necessariamente se expressa apenas por "seres humanos".À minha querida mãe, Fátima Belém, pessoa mais importante de minha vida, luz que iluminou meu caminho e que certamente continuará a me guiar de algum lugar deste universo. A você, mãe, que partiu tão precoce e inesperadamente, deixando um imenso vazio, uma profunda saudade... The results show a balance in the distribution of the two variants in the speech community. Although it was observed a typical change in progress (apparent time) in the 1970s, the analysis of the 2000s data reveals a case of stable variation in the speech community.In the 2000s, the innovative, phonetically reduced variant tends to be favored by younger people and women over 50 years old. Cê is disfavored among individuals between 35 and 45 years -which can be related to issues of speech monitoring and the linguistic market (Paiva & Duarte, 2003). In addition, cê tends to be avoided by those whose level of education is higher, and is favored in conversations between informants who are friends or relatives.From a linguistic perspective, the use of variants is correlated by the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) and by morphosyntactic, semantic and discursive-cognitive factors, with special attention to the reference of the pronoun.Results confirm the hypothesis of cliticization of the reduced variant, but reveal a counterargument for the direct correlation between "phonetic erosion" and "semantic abstraction", which has been claimed in the literature on grammaticalization.