{"title":"A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Word-Final /s/ Aspiration in a Rio de Janeiro Favela","authors":"E. Brito","doi":"10.5334/jpl.205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.205","url":null,"abstract":"Following the theoretical and methodological principles of Variationist Sociolinguistics, this paper analyzes the use of the aspirated variant of postvocalic /s/ by residents of City of God, a predominantly-black neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro that is widely known as a favela (roughly, shantytown or slum). The analyzed data consist of seventeen sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2015 with twenty-two residents of this community. The quantitative analysis included six social variables—race/color, regional origin, age, gender, education, and speaker—as well as six linguistic variables—preceding vowel, following sound, syllabic stress, number of syllables, grammatical category, and word. Race/color, age, and all the linguistic factors considered in the analysis were selected as statistically significant to the occurrence of /s/ aspiration. This study indicates a possible connection between aspiration and race/color and stresses the importance of including racial identity as a relevant factor in sociolinguistic studies in Brazil, especially those focusing on favelas and other similar urban communities.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43676846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On (the) sandhi between the Sanskrit and the Modern Western Grammatical Traditions: From Colebrooke to Bloomfield via Müller","authors":"Giovanni Ciotti","doi":"10.5334/JPL.215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.215","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the history of how modern Western linguistics adopted the term sandhi from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and adapted it to its theoretical needs. In particular, we will acknowledge the fundamental role played by Muller, 1 who combining both Indic (Prakriyā grammars and Prātiśākhyas) and Western approaches (those of Colebrooke and Bopp) to the representation of Sanskrit grammar, coined in 1866 the labels of internal sandhi and external sandhi. Such labels gained momentum thanks to the works of Whitney in the 19th century and Bloomfield in the 20th century and eventually became common parlance in Western linguistics.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41669159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remarks on Finite Control and Hyper-Raising in Brazilian Portuguese","authors":"Jairo Nunes","doi":"10.5334/JPL.196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.196","url":null,"abstract":"In this reply I examine Modesto’s (2011) claim that null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are not controlled and are not derived by movement. I show that the critique has a considerable number of misconceptions, misunderstandings and misrepresentations that prevent a proper evaluation of movement approaches to null subjects in BP. When the relevant points are rectified, we see that the technical problems are inexistent and the empirical coverage of the movement approach is even more comprehensive than initially thought.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46530469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Design Proposal of an Online Corpus-Driven Dictionary of Portuguese for University Students","authors":"T. Kuhn","doi":"10.5334/JPL.209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.209","url":null,"abstract":"The objective of this PhD project was to propose the design of an online corpus-driven dictionary of Portuguese for university students (DOPU), aimed at both speakers of Portuguese as a mother tongue and as an additional language and covering Brazilian and European Portuguese varieties. For that, the highly innovative semi-automated approach to dictionary-making (Gantar, Kosem and Krek 2016) was adopted, which involves automatic extraction of data from the corpus and import into dictionary writing system. As a method that had never been applied for lexicographical projects of the Portuguese language, it was necessary to experiment the approach for the first time. Thus, all the required pre-requisites were newly developed, namely, a corpus of academic texts, sketch grammar, GDEX configuration, and a specially-tailored procedure for automatic extraction of data. The experiment indicated that not only can this approach be successfully used as a means to provide lexical content for the design of DOPU, but it can also be beneficial to other lexicographical projects of Portuguese.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43533283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pesky Ablative: Early European Missionaries’ Treatment of Tamil ‘Ablatives’","authors":"G. James","doi":"10.5334/JPL.206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.206","url":null,"abstract":"In their efforts to create accessible pedagogical grammars of Tamil, early missionaries applied the reference model of Latin and Portuguese grammars and other missioners’ works to the nominal and verbal paradigms they constructed of the language. In so doing, they met with difficulties in formulating the terminology to express the phenomena they encountered. For example, the early missionary grammarians regularly classed several distinct Tamil terminations as ‘ablatives’, because the various senses of these are subsumed in Latin within one ablative case (itself historically derived from three Proto-Indo-European cases: separative ablative, comitative/instrumental, and inessive locative). Different configurations were proposed over the centuries, but, despite the emerging knowledge of the native Tamil grammatical tradition, which had long been influenced by Sanskrit declensional standards, always with a Latinate foundation. The missionaries’ grammars created among Europeans a perception of Tamil that its declensional patterning was akin to that of Latin, and that morphologically realised divergent senses are related because their equivalents in Latin are, readings which persist in many modern didactic descriptions.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48739175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributions of Cunha Rivara (1809–1879) to the Development of Konkani","authors":"Gonçalo Fernandes","doi":"10.5334/JPL.204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.204","url":null,"abstract":"Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara (1809–1879) was a Portuguese physician, professor of philosophy, politician, librarian and secretary of the governor-general of India (1855–1870). During his job in Goa, he gave a strong impulse to the development of Konkani, a provincial language of Goa. On 28 November 1857, he was appointed by the governor-general to lead a commission established to coordinate, prepare and print Portuguese-Konkani and Konkani-Portuguese dictionaries and other “monuments” of the same language. In addition to many books with primary documentation of the history of Portuguese in India, he published a Historical Essay on Konkani Language that he wrote himself; a grammar by Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619); an anonymous grammar, possibly written in the 17th century by a Franciscan or Jesuit living in Thane, on Salsette Island; and a grammar and a dictionary written probably by the Vicar Apostolic of Verapoly from 1831 to 1844, Francesco Saverio di Sant’Anna, O.C.D. (1771–1844), which circulated as manuscripts. His intense editorial activity in the defense and the dignity of Konkani, against the “despreso da lingua materna” [the contempt of the native language] (Rivara 1857b: CXIII) by Goans, allows us to consider Cunha Rivara the pioneer of the Renaissance of Konkani studies in the 19th century. Despite the fact that he did not know Konkani, Cunha Rivara paved the way for the 20th century Konkanists scholars who were inspired by his publications, such as Gerson da Cunha (1844–1900), Sebastiao Dalgado (1855–1922), Shennoi Goembab (1877–1946), Mariano Saldanha (1878–1975) and Joaquim Antonio Fernandes (1889–1975). He also had a substantial impact on the overall development of the study of Konkani.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47721496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Early Descriptors and Descriptions of South Asian Languages from the 16th Century Onwards","authors":"Cristina Muru","doi":"10.5334/jpl.202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.202","url":null,"abstract":"An introduction to the special collection “Early Descriptors and Descriptions of South Asian Languages from the 16th Century Onwards” that develops the main ideas on which the contributions in this special edition of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics focus. The Introduction is not only a premise to the individual papers included in the volume and which are presented in the last paragraph. Emphasising the role played both by Portuguese individuals and by the Portuguese language as a metalanguage, it examines how the diffusion of Christianity in India led to the description of South Asian languages and how the grammaticisation of South Indian languages came about.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49415717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Grammar Meets Pragmatics: Subject Preference and Coherence Relations in Brazilian Portuguese Pronoun Interpretation","authors":"M. Godoy, J. Weissheimer, Matheus Araújo Mafra","doi":"10.5334/JPL.197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.197","url":null,"abstract":"Although pronominal reference is a common device in language, there is much debate about how we use contextual and structural cues to process pronouns. The main goal of the present study was to set a completion experiment following Rohde’s (2008) work to test how pragmatic and grammatical cues interact during pronoun interpretation. Our motivation was to use Brazilian Portuguese as the target language, as its pronominal system is known to differ from English, which could give rise to cross-linguistic differences in pronoun interpretation. Forty-eight participants wrote continuations for incomplete passages to verify whether verbal aspect, verb semantics and coherence relations elicited the same pattern of pronoun interpretation as reported in Rohde (2008). Overall, our findings support an expectation-driven model, in which pronoun interpretation is the result of both structural and pragmatic cues. We conclude that cross-linguistic differences can be accounted by such model, and that structural cues have a more prominent role in causing these differences, while pragmatic-driven expectations would exert the same influence on pronoun interpretation across languages.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45987589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Subject Pronoun Expression in Santomean Portuguese","authors":"Marie-Eve Bouchard","doi":"10.5334/JPL.191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.191","url":null,"abstract":"Studies on Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in the Portuguese-speaking world have shown a distinction between European Portuguese, which is a Null Subject Language (NSL) with high rates of null subjects, and Brazilian Portuguese, which is controversially treated as a partial-NSL and exhibits a considerably lower rate of null subjects. No specific studies have been conducted on the matter on Santomean Portuguese, but we know that both null and overt subject personal pronouns exist in this variety of Portuguese. The objective of this paper is to investigate variation in SPE in Santomean Portuguese, and to situate this variety of Portuguese in comparison with other varieties. Results of the variationist analyses show that Santomean Portuguese patterns more like European Portuguese in its high rate of use of null subject. Interestingly, and contrary to previous studies, Santomeans with a higher level of education disfavor the use of null subject, which I relate to a sensitivity to grammatical ideology and the favoring of the overt subject in more formal situations. Most of the results regarding the linguistic predictors, which are stronger than the social predictors, relate Santomean Portuguese to other varieties of Portuguese, and to Spanish.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48669248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Becker, A. Nevins, F. Sandalo, Érick Rizzato
{"title":"The Acquisition Path of [w]-final Plurals in Brazilian Portuguese","authors":"Michael Becker, A. Nevins, F. Sandalo, Érick Rizzato","doi":"10.5334/JPL.189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5334/JPL.189","url":null,"abstract":"The plural of Brazilian Portuguese [w]-final nouns includes an alternation with [j], but the change is partially blocked in monosyllables and following a tense vowel (Becker et al. 2017). In this paper, we present a nonce word study with 115 children ages 7–13 and 43 adults, all participants from the state of Sao Paulo, showing that blocking in monosyllables is acquired earlier than blocking by tense vowels. We claim that sensitivity to monosyllabicity and vowel tenseness are both due to universal phonological pressures, but the effect of vowel tenseness is learned more slowly because it is limited to the plural morphology in this language. Our results from nonce words are convergent with evidence from innovative plurals and loanword adaptation, showing the primacy of phonological factors over history, orthography, and lexical frequency when it comes to alternations and their acquisition.","PeriodicalId":41871,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Portuguese Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42992806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}