Tinker Visiting Professor Courses

Brazilian Portuguese Syntax: Identifying African Substrate Influence

LACS 25134/35134 (LING 25134/35134)
Esmeralda Vailati Negrão
TTh 09:30 - 10:50 AM

Different perspectives exist regarding the origins of Brazilian Portuguese (BP): Is it the outcome of mere drift from European Portuguese? Is it the outcome of “creolization”? The main goal of this course is to present and discuss some syntactic phenomena of BP that distinguish it from European Portuguese and other Romance languages, which could be explained by BP’s emergence in an ecology of language contact between European, African and Indigenous languages spoken in colonial Brazil. A set of syntactic features of BP grammar including null subjects, verbal agreement, null objects, word order, pronominal system, voice, verbal alternations, relative clauses, wh-questions, focus constructions and negation, will be examined. These will be compared with features of Bantu and Kwa languages to show that they might to have played a critical role in the restructuring process.