LINGUIST List 29.3852
Sun Oct 07 2018
Confs: Historical Linguistics/Brazil
Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everettlinguistlist.org>
Date: 05-Oct-2018
From: Cristiane Namiuti <cristianenamiuti
uesb.edu.br>
Subject: Portuguese in Space and Time: a laboratory for linguistic change
E-mail this message to a friend Portuguese in Space and Time: a laboratory for linguistic change
Date: 07-May-2019 - 07-May-2019
Location: Maceió. Alagoas, Brazil
Contact: Charlotte Galves Cristiane Namiuti
Contact Email:
< click here to access email > Meeting URL:
https://www.abralin.org/abralin50/inicio/
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
Meeting Description:
Portuguese in Space and Time: a laboratory for linguistic change
Charlotte Galves (Unicamp)
Email: charlotte.mgc
gmail.com
Cristiane Namiuti (UESB)
Email: cristianenamiuti
uesb.edu.br
As attested by historical data extracted from written documents , Portuguese went through many grammatical changes, due first to its southward expansion from its original place in the Iberian Peninsula and then to its overseas expansion. Both Modern European Portuguese (henceforth EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) originate from what is called Classical Portuguese (henceforth ClP) which is a period that traditionally goes from Gil Vicente’s death (1536) to the end of the 18th century (cf. Mattos e Silva 1994). In Galves, Namiuti and Paixão de Sousa (2006)’s proposal, which focus not on E-Language but on I-language, ClP grammar has its initial roots in the phase dubbed as Middle Portuguese in the traditional periodization (end of the 14th century, and 15th century) and ends with the first generation of 18th century writers.
Thanks to the Tycho Brahe Corpus of Historical Portuguese, which is composed of texts written between 1380 and 1890, it has been possible to describe and analyze the grammar from which both EP and BP originate. Recent work has shown that ClP is a relaxed V2 language (Wolfe 2016), and clitic placement syntax is sensitive to prosody. The V2 phenomenon abruptly decreases in the texts written by the first generation of 18th century writers. At the same time, the evolution of clitic placement goes in the direction of the generalization of enclisis in all the contexts in which, in ClP, there was enclisis/proclisis variation, with a high predominance of the latter (Galves e Paixão de Sousa 2005, 2017). The collapse of the V2 system manifests itself in the increasing of SV order in detriment of VS and XV, without affecting the frequency of null subjects. In BP, the loss of V2 also occurs, but clitic placement follows the opposite direction (generalized proclisis) and null subjects syntax goes through a deep reorganization (cf. Duarte 1993, 2012). Other changes appear, due to the intensive linguistic contact occurred in Brazil, in particular with the African languages brought by millions of enslaved Africans (Fiorin e Petter 2008, Lucchesi, Baxter e Ribeiro 2009, Avelar e Galves 2014). Additionally, in the second half of the 19th century, a strong influence of EP grammatical innovations can be observed in the texts written in Brazil, producing a three-grammar competition that will be solved only during the 20th century (Carneiro and Galves 2010). This situation has produced intensive variability, and there is still a debate about whether this variability is due to grammar competition or has become a type of stable variation involving functional specialization (cf. Cyrino and Torres Moraes 2018 ).
The history of Portuguese therefore constitutes a very rich laboratory for the discussion of crucial issues in linguistic theory such as the causes of different types of linguistic change, their dynamics, the effect of contact, grammar competition phenomena, the nature of parameters, the role of interfaces.
The aim of this symposium is to bring together corpus-based studies that discuss and analyze quantitative and qualitative aspects of this complex history, from its origins to the present days, from the various points of view mentioned above. The opportunity of bringing together different approaches in the same session justifies the symposium format.
Page Updated: 07-Oct-2018