Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

Possession and location in African varieties of Portuguese

In the last three decades, African varieties of Portuguese (AVP) have become the object of an increasing body of research focusing on emerging patterns and features that are often argued to have arisen due to language contact in an environment of L2 acquisition. This work generally focuses on a single variety, applies highly diverse methodologies, and tends to overlook individual and collective patterns of variation. This special collection therefore aims to contribute to a more fine-grained and systematic understanding of the factors driving the observed patterns of microvariation in AVP by cross-comparing the nativizing and nativized varieties of Portuguese spoken in the capitals of Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as their typologically distinct, main contact languages from the Bantu group and Creole. The five papers are based on contemporary spoken corpora of the three AVP, addressing topics in the domain of possession and location, in particular constructions involving ditransitive verbs, verbs of movement, external possession, and possessor raising. This comprehensive approach will lead to new descriptions and analyses that will contribute novel perspectives to our understanding of the factors underlying syntactic and semantic restructuring in AVP.

Guest Editors:
Tjerk Hagemeijer, Universidade de Lisboa, t.hagemeijer@letras.ulisboa.pt
Inês Duarte, Universidade de Lisboa, iduarte@letras.ulisboa.pt
Rita Gonçalves, Universidade de Lisboa, ritamgg@gmail.com