The main goal of this paper is to reply the critical analysis made by Petersen in her paper A tripartição pronominal e o estatuto das proformas Ce, Ocê e Você, published in this journal, concerning our analysis presented in Vitral (1996) and Ramos (1997) which take the form cê to be a clitic and one of the stages of a grammaticalization process that had as source the expression Vossa Mercê.
weak form; clitic; grammaticalization; você/ocê/cê