In the history of Brazil, Africans and their descendants figure prominently. In many of the country’s regions, they represented a majority of the population, especially in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The features of Brazilian Portuguese are described and the possible links between the demographic makeup of the country and the presence of the features are explored.
31-40 of 605 Results
Article
Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese
J. Clancy Clements
Article
Morphology of Determiners in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
The question of articles and definiteness has given rise to a great deal of work, whether from a theoretical, typological, historical, or other perspective. Given the breadth of the field, it would be unrealistic in a synthesis of this kind to go through all the work that has been done on this subject, some of which may be relatively old. We have therefore focused on a certain number of aspects which seemed relevant to us, taking into consideration dialectal data which are not often taken into account. Another difficulty of the undertaking is that the question of articles concerns various fields of investigation: syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The focus of this contribution is therefore on the morphology of articles in Romance languages. After having sought to circumscribe the concept of determination, the origin and distribution of articles in a number of Romance varieties are described. Particular attention is paid to the phenomena of variation that manifest themselves at the phonomorphological level. The morpho-syntax of other kinds of determiners is discussed as well—demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives. The question of the maintenance of case distinctions in the Romance determiners will also be addressed, as well as the discussed and intriguing question of lack of agreement within the noun phrase. Given their special status, it will be shown that personal and place names show particular constraints with respect to definite articles, due among other things to their historical genesis.
Article
Non-Finite Verb-Forms in the Romance Languages
Nigel Vincent
The distinction between finite and non-finite forms, although a standard part of traditional grammatical descriptions, is not easy to establish and is not necessarily the same from language to language, not least because of the different ways the forms in question have developed over time and the different constructions that they are part of. Nor is terminology in this domain used consistently in the literature. The present article therefore begins with a brief overview of these issues before moving on the consider the Latin patterns which lie behind modern Romance developments. These in turn will be examined form by form and construction by construction with exemplification drawn, as appropriate, from different Romance varieties. The approach blends synchrony with diachrony. Space does not permit exhaustive coverage of all forms in all languages, but nonetheless examples are drawn from across the family with a view to demonstrating significant regional and historical differences. Where relevant, cross-reference will also be made to other articles in the present collection which address in greater detail some of structures considered here.
Article
Number Marking in Nouns and Adjectives in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
Even though Romance languages are taken to be well-known because of their clearly identified ancestor, they continuously offer a source of patterns and phenomena that are far from being properly taken into account in typological surveys. Corbett rightly pointed out that the question of number has erroneously been held to be simple and straightforward. Needless to say, if many Romance varieties suffer from endangerment or from sociological marginalization, other varieties like French are in some sense trapped in the ice of their norm and such a situation may lead in some cases to questionable analyses. Any French speaker will hold that the feminine of adjectives such as natif [naˈtif] ‘native’ is formed by substituting [f] for [v] and adding final -e at the orthographic level, hence the feminine singular form native [naˈtiv], as in, say, vert-e ‘green’. It is clear, however, that the opposition between natif and native relies on voice-alternation of the adjective final consonant. Various examples of this kind can be adduced to show how phonetic processes contribute to morphological oppositions.
Article
Pidgins and Creoles With Germanic Lexifier Languages
Peter Bakker
There are pidgins with Dutch, English, German, and Scandinavian lexifiers, and creoles with Dutch (three), German (one), and English (dozens) lexifiers. Pidgins and creoles have been documented in all parts of the world. They have developed in contact between Europeans and indigenous populations, often as part of the colonial enterprise. Pidgins are often associated with trade and initial phases of contact, and they do not display all design features of natural languages, whereas creoles tend to be mother tongues and complex natural languages. Pidgins that have developed into creoles may maintain the original label “pidgin” (e.g., Tok Pisin < Talk Pidgin), even though they have developed into full-fledged complex languages and hence creoles, or pidgincreoles. Germanic-lexifier pidgins share properties with other pidgins, such as invariant forms for nouns and verbs, personal pronouns, optional tense marking, lack of aspect marking, and a limited lexicon. Germanic creoles likewise share properties with other creoles, such as preverbal marking of aspect, mood, and/or tense, the development of optional plural marking, and the presence of definite and indefinite articles. Germanic pidgins, however, often show articles, whereas other pidgins rarely display them. Creole languages worldwide share a number of properties, in that similar grammatical categories developed independently from one another, after having lost most of the grammatical system of the lexifiers. Most creole languages are associated with forced population displacement (blackbirding, slavery), but the German creole Unserdeutsch of Papua New Guinea is associated with a school. The three Dutch-lexifier creoles came into being in Guyana and the Virgin Islands, and they all developed independently. Berbice Dutch Creole is quite deviant, and several theories have been launched to explain the presence of a significant component from one specific Nigerian language, Eastern Ijo. English-lexifier creoles are conveniently divided into two groups, Pacific creoles and Atlantic creoles. Both groups seem to go back to one source, judged by the quantity of shared lexical and grammatical similarities that are so specific that they cannot be due to independent processes of creolization. There are also mixed languages and other contact phenomena involving Germanic languages, and a full list of these is provided with selected references.
Article
Raciolinguistics
Jennifer Phuong, María Cioè-Peña, and Arianna Chinchilla
Raciolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to race, is an emergent field primarily stemming from U.S. academia and centering critical theories, including educational and applied linguistics. There currently exists a debate as to whether the theories that undergird raciolinguistics should be the grounding for a field (i.e., raciolinguistics) or a theoretical underpinning (i.e., raciolinguistic perspectives/ideologies) of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, particularly works that are rooted in the embodied experiences of racialized people. H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball edited a volume that brought together scholars whose works address the intersection of race and language to consider raciolinguistics as a field. Still, others believe it is necessary to understand phenomena that go beyond named languages while still rooted in hierarchical conceptualizations of race. As such, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have introduced and continue to build on a raciolinguistic perspective by rooting contemporary phenomena in colonial histories. Using this lens, they position language evaluations and assessments of racialized people as extensions of colonial racial projects rooted in dehumanization and commodification. Since then, scholars from multiple fields have engaged with raciolinguistics and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore language and race using a variety of methods (e.g., discourse analysis, mixed methods), contexts (e.g., diverse places and participants), scales (e.g., policy, interpersonal interactions), and institutions (e.g., healthcare, education). Regardless of the specific framing of raciolinguistics, the field and perspective both foreground racial and linguistic justice.
Article
Translanguaging
Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia García
Translanguaging frames the study of bilingualism within theoretical and applied linguistics in a way that transcends the speaker’s separate codes or languages, named or not. These codes or languages are regarded as possessing a social ontology but not a cognitive linguistic one. While linguistic features such as (depending on the theory) phonemes, morphemes, sentences, lexical and grammatical signs, constructions, rules, checks, movements, derivations, and so on can legitimately be seen as cognitively real by their different proponents, their allocation to different languages or codes cannot. The separate allocation of these linguistic features to separate codes or languages is of considerable social relevance to the individuals and communities said to be using them, but should not be uncritically translated into representations of two separate grammars. Under translanguaging, named languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Hindi, Quechua, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba, etc.) exist only as sociopolitically institutionalized constructions, not as objects endowed with psycholinguistic reality.
The term translanguaging makes reference to the following 10 interconnected and mutually supporting proposals: (a) a broadly conceived pedagogical alternative to the strict language separation typical of many language education programs; (b) a denial of the dual correspondence hypothesis about the repertoire of bilinguals, under which the sociocultural conception of bilinguals as having two separate languages is assumed to reflect a dual cognitive representation; (c) the adoption of an alternative representation involving a unitary repertoire of linguistic features, under which a single inventory of lexical and morphosyntactic units best describes the psycholinguistics of bilingualism; (d) an integrated view of bilingual speech performance, under which speakers pick and choose from their unitary repertoire the lexical and morphosyntactic features appropriate to the moment, the context, and the interlocutor; (e) the denial that this process of selection sometimes constitutes normal or unmarked language use but other times involves mixing or switching between languages or codes; (f) the necessary rejection, if the above are to be implemented, of the idea that only the language practices of speakers with institutional power in Western societies are normal and universal; (g) the related recognition that named languages have gone hand in hand with the historical process of colonial expansion and nation-building, which relied on named languages to establish its system of control, including particularly the control of minoritized speakers, especially minoritized children in school; (h) the related critique of the abyssal thinking that has prevented scholars in Europe and the United States from seeing what lies across the abyssal line dividing the geographic and philosophical North from the modes of knowledge of the South; (i) the adoption of the scholarship of the Global South, dealing with the transformation of pedagogical practices to recognize the dynamic bilingualism of language learners, replacing in many settings the now outdated notion of additive bilingualism; and finally and perhaps most importantly, (j) the affirmation of a view of schooling for fluent or emergent bilingual students that focuses not exclusively on the teaching and assessment of named languages but of communicative capacities broadly conceived that reflect the autochthonous practices of bilinguals and their communities.
Article
Usage-Based Approaches to Germanic Languages
Martin Hilpert
The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.
Article
Morphology of Clitic Pronouns in the Romance Languages
Berthold Crysmann and Ana R. Luís
Bound weak pronominals, such as French les in Je les ai vu(e)s ‘I have seen them’ or Italian lo in Giovanni lo vuole ‘John wants it’, are generally known in the literature as clitic pronouns. There are a number of reasons why it has been claimed that these forms behave more like affixes than like independent word forms. Among other aspects, it has been shown that the behavior of Romance clitic pronouns inside the clitic cluster is morphophonologically and morphotactically identical to that of affixes. Likewise, the fact that clitic pronouns both trigger non-productive allomorphy on the verb and undergo allomorphic variation indicates that clitic pronouns attach to the verb in the morphology rather than in the syntax. In this article, we survey the main morphological properties that have been previously documented for Romance clitic pronouns. We show that the Romance languages exhibit a variety of morphological idiosyncrasies and that such variation poses serious challenges to general syntactic principles. Having demonstrated the affixal nature of clitic systems, we then turn to more controversial aspects of clitic pronouns, namely clitic climbing with auxiliaries and complex predicates. These contexts, which pose interesting challenges to both morphology and syntax, have been commonly used to weaken the inflectional approach to clitic pronouns. We survey existing lexicalist accounts of clitic systems and show how the interaction between clitics and syntax can be captured within an inflectional analysis of clitic pronouns.
Article
SE Constructions in the Romance Languages
Diego Pescarini
SE constructions across the Romance languages have been classified on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence. Although the terminology varies, at least four main types of SE can be identified: three constructions in which SE can be interpreted as an argument (the reflexive/reciprocal SE, the arbitrary/impersonal SE, the middle SE) and a residual set of SE-marked predicates in which SE has not a clear pronominal status. Evidence from SE constructions is a crucial test bed for theories concerning the syntactic mapping of argument and event structure.
