Abstract

AVELAR, Juanito  and  GALVES, Charlotte. THE ROLE OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES IN THE EMERGENCE OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE GRAMMAR. Lingüística [online]. 2014, vol.30, n.2, pp.241-288. ISSN 2079-312X.

This paper argues that African languages spoken by the slaves brought to Brazil played a significant role in the emergence of some of the grammatical properties of Brazilian Portuguese. Exploring mentalist assumptions, the study deals with morpho-syntactic parallelisms between Brazilian and African Portuguese, as well as between such Portuguese varieties and Bantu languages, in order to propose that the acquisition of Portuguese as second language by Africans produced two types of changes: (i) changes linked to the transfer of syntactic properties from their native languages to emerging Portuguese varieties in Brazil, and (ii) changes linked to grammatical restructuring triggered by difficulties in learning morpho-syntactic features of Portuguese.

Keywords : Brazilian Portuguese; African Portuguese; Bantu languages; language contact; grammatical change.

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