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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 1394

Part of Session 163: Variation and change in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Other abstracts in this session)

Subject-Verb agreement in Portuguese. The significance of phonological and phonetic phenomena

Authors: Mota, Maria Antónia
Submitted by: Mota, Maria Antónia (Faculdade de Letras - Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)

The aim of this study is to identify, in Portuguese language varieties, the significance of the phonological variant features and their phonetic realizations in the agreement within the SV domain.

Building on data from spoken European, Brazilian, and African varieties of Portuguese (EP, BP, AP), we will try to determine how meaningful is the status of agreement in the grammar(s) of Portuguese, and to ascertain the relevance of a number of phonological and phonetic variant features in the markdness of person and number categories.

Taking into account the results of two Brazilian-Portuguese research projects, in what the European varieties are concerned, as well as personal work, it is clear that the amount of ‘non-canonical agreement’ in EP varieties is insignificant. By that we mean that the absence of overt agreement marks in the verb are statistical negligible. The observation of the European data suggests that phonological factors are the most important to explain the default agreement/the variable agreement. Those factors are mainly limited to (i) a variant treatment of the /vowelN/ final syllable of the third plural person – this phenomenon may lead to syncretism between P3 and P6: ele~eles sabe (he/she~they know) vs. ele sabe, eles sabem, the last one with /vowelN/), and to (ii) the elision of final /S/ of the P4 marker ‑mos.

It is appealing to deepen the understanding of this kind of phenomena, in order to calculate their relevance as linguistic factors in Portuguese agreement in general. To do so, we will analyse samples of spoken EP, BP and AP, and try to dress a tentative portrait of the convergence vs. divergence among varieties.  In sum, our aim is to find answers to three main questions:  What is the status of agreement in Portuguese? Is agreement a morphosyntactic phenomenon or a morhophonosyntactic one? What is the relative weight of phonological and phonetic factors in the variable agreement in Portuguese?

 

Bibliography

Baxter, A. (2004) The Development of variable NP plural agreement in a restructured African variety of Portuguese. Secure, G. & A. Schwegler (eds.) Creoles, contact, and language change: linguistics and social implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 97-126.

Booij, G. (2002) Language variation and phonological theory: inflected adjectives in Dutch and related languages. In Jan Berns & Jaap van Marle (eds.) Amsterdam: Present-day Dialectology, Problems and Findings. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 35-56.

Brandão, S. F. (forthcoming) Concordância nominal em duas variedades do português:  convergências e divergências. Congresso Internacional Línguas Pluricêntricas: Variação    linguística e Dimensões Sociocognitivas, Braga, Setembro, 2010.

Gonçalves, Perpétua (2002) The role of ambiguity in second language change: the case of Mozambican African Portuguese. Second Language Research, 18: 325-347.

Mota, M. A., Vieira, S. R. (2008) Contrastando variedades do          português brasileiro e europeu: padrões de concordância sujeito-verbo.        

Gonçalves, C., Almeida M.L.L. (eds.), Língua portuguesa: identidade, difusão e variabilidade. Rio de Janeiro: AILP/UFRJ: 111-37.