29.3852, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Brazil

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3852. Sun Oct 07 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3852, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Brazil

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Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2018 18:24:05
From: Cristiane Namiuti [cristianenamiuti at uesb.edu.br]
Subject: Portuguese in Space and Time: a laboratory for linguistic change

 
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: charlotte.mgc at gmail.com 
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 at gmail.com

Cristiane Namiuti (UESB) 
Email: cristianenamiuti at 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.
 






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