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3 The history of linguistic contact underlying Brazilian Portuguese

  • Dante Lucchesi and Alan Baxter
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Abstract

The current chapter provides a historical overview of how the contact between languages shaped the development of varieties of the Portuguese language in Brazil. Prior to sketching details of the historical linguistic contacts, an outline of the controversy surrounding this view is presented, showing how research of recent decades rejects the hypothesis of secular drift as a source of the massive variation inherent in Popular Brazilian Portuguese. The chapter then presents a brief historical overview of the contact between languages in Brazil, covering the major phases of language contact in the colonial period that yielded the sociolinguistic divide that typifies Brazilian society today. Subsequently, the concept of irregular linguistic transmission is introduced to account for how Brazil’s historical situations of language contact altered the grammatical structure of Popular Brazilian Portuguese. The final sections of the chapter describe the morpho-syntactic characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese that stem from changes caused by language contact, while drawing parallels with the structuring processes that formed the Portuguese-lexified creole languages of Africa.

Abstract

The current chapter provides a historical overview of how the contact between languages shaped the development of varieties of the Portuguese language in Brazil. Prior to sketching details of the historical linguistic contacts, an outline of the controversy surrounding this view is presented, showing how research of recent decades rejects the hypothesis of secular drift as a source of the massive variation inherent in Popular Brazilian Portuguese. The chapter then presents a brief historical overview of the contact between languages in Brazil, covering the major phases of language contact in the colonial period that yielded the sociolinguistic divide that typifies Brazilian society today. Subsequently, the concept of irregular linguistic transmission is introduced to account for how Brazil’s historical situations of language contact altered the grammatical structure of Popular Brazilian Portuguese. The final sections of the chapter describe the morpho-syntactic characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese that stem from changes caused by language contact, while drawing parallels with the structuring processes that formed the Portuguese-lexified creole languages of Africa.

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