Phonological Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Battisti
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Phonological Variation ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Break Up

Brazilian Portuguese is the native language of more than 200 million people living in Brazil. Spoken in South America since around the year 1500, Brazilian Portuguese has peculiar phonological traits, many of them variable. The extensive language contact that has taken place in Brazil caused Brazilian Portuguese to break up into regional dialects. Various phonological processes affect Brazilian Portuguese at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Some of the processes target consonants, such as the regressive palatalization of /t, d/, the fricatization of /r/ in syllabic onset; some processes target vowels, such as the raising and lowering of unstressed /e, o/ vowels; others target the intonation of utterances, such as the rising of the nuclear stress of yes–no questions. The results of several empirical studies on varieties of Brazilian Portuguese show that not all of the processes correspond to change in progress in Brazilian Portuguese; some of them are stable variables. They also show that not every variable is present in all dialects and that some variables are socially salient and stigmatized. Compared to present European Portuguese, the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese seems to be conservative in some aspects, such as in the raising of vowels in unstressed, word-final syllables; innovative in others, such as in the vocalization of /l/ in syllabic coda.

Review article: Spanish-English and Portuguese-English interlanguage phonology

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-282
Author(s):  
Fred R Eckman
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Adult Learners ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
L2 Phonology

This review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult learners of English whose native language is either Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese. The criteria applied for the evaluation lead to the conclusion that, for the most part, the studies are successful in presenting an interesting array of second-language pronunciation patterns, and that such an intersection of domains is a fruitful way to advance the field of interphonology.

scholarly journals Nasalização regressiva heterossilábica (NRH) da vogal /a/ acentuada em PE

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-317
Author(s):  
Shanyi Lao ◽  
Celeste Rodrigues ◽  
Fernando Brissos
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Target Structure ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Stressed Syllable ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
Mainland Portugal ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Nasal Consonant

According to the autosegmental model adopted by Mateus & Andrade (2000), the nasal vowel in Portuguese, in words such as cinco, lã and campo, is a phonetic form derived from a phonological oral vowel plus a nasal autosegment N in the same syllable. However, we can also notice the nasalization in words such as cãma, cẽna and cũnha in Portuguese, although not often in the standard language. This phenomenon is an heterosyllabic regressive nasalization (NRH), in which the nasal consonant of the onset nasalizes the previous vowel. In Brazilian Portuguese, there are more studies related to NRH than in European Portuguese and most of them treat it as a phonetic phenomenon (Câmara Jr., 1970; Battisti, 1997; Botelho, 2007). Moraes & Wetzels (1992) find NRH more frequently in the stressed syllable and with the palatal consonant /ɲ/, but its frequency varies in different dialects. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the variation of NRH in Mainland Portugal and the phonological processes that go together with it, focusing particularly on the structure /a/[+ac] .C[+nas] (/m/, /n/, /ɲ/). We collected occurrences that contain the target structure from the corpus Linguistic-Ethnographic Atlas of Portugal and Galicia and our analysis is based on the phonetic transcriptions performed by CLUL dialectologists. By calculating the percentage of NRH in each locality and making dialectal maps, the results show that: i) NRH can be found almost throughout the entire territory; ii) it has a greater frequency in Northwest (mainly with the consonant /ɲ/), Beira Baixa, Alentejo, and Algarve; iii) multiple phenomena transform the phonological segments into different phonetic shapes; iv) in a diachronic analysis, the changing path of /a/ in Portuguese in this structure is: [a] → [ã] → [ɐ̃]→ [ɐ], which shows that the elevation of /a/ follows the NRH. Dialects, then, choose between one of these phonetic variants.

Other Romance varieties

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma Schifano
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Subjunctive Conditional ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Verb Placement ◽  
Selection Of

Chapter 3 extends the investigation of verb placement to other Romance varieties, in order to expand the macro- and micro-typologies identified in Chapter 2. It starts with a description of the placement of the present indicative verb across a selection of varieties of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese. Following the methodology of Chapter 2, the remainder of the discussion is devoted to the description of cases of microvariation attested across the varieties above, which emerge once a selection of structural and interpretative distinctions are considered, such as lexical and auxiliary verbs, ‘have’ and ‘be’ auxiliaries, finite and non-finite verbs (cf. participle and infinitive), as well as a selection of modally, temporally, and aspectually marked forms (e.g. subjunctive, conditional, past, future, imperfect).

A Computer Corpus-Based Study of Subject Raising in Modern Portuguese

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-400
Author(s):  
Mark Davies
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Comprehensive Data ◽  
Production Strategies ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Raising

This study is the first comprehensive, data-based examination of subject raising in Portuguese, and is based on 4500+ tokens in more than 26,500,000 words of text from both the written and spoken registers of Brazilian and European Portuguese. We have suggested that there are important differences in raising between the spoken and written registers, which are related to presumably universal production strategies for the two registers. Evidence suggests that morphological factors such as subject-verb agreement play an important role in determining whether raising occurs with first, second, and third person subjects. In terms of differences between the European and Brazilian dialects, we find that split agreement (eles parece saberem) and obligatory coreference {me parece ver um fantasma) are both more common in European Portuguese. Finally, these last two facts, along with a number of related phenomena, suggest that there are important differences in the underlying clause structure of European and Brazilian Portuguese, which can further be extended to include other languages such as Spanish.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Language History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Child Language Acquisition ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about what one knows. In some languages, one always has to specify the information source on which it is based—whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on something seen or on common sense, or was told about it by someone else. This is the essence of evidentiality, or grammatical marking of information source—an exciting category loved by linguists, journalists, and the general public. This volume provides a state-of-the art view of evidentiality in its various guises, their role in cognition and discourse, child language acquisition, language contact, and language history, with a specific focus on languages which have grammatical evidentials, including numerous languages from North and South America, Eurasia and the Pacific, and also Japanese, Korean, and signed languages.

Ghiţa Ionescu and Comparative Communist Politics

1997 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-214
Author(s):  
Peter Ferdinand
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Soviet Empire ◽  
Break Up ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Main Ideas

GHIŢA IONESCU'S MAIN WORKS ON COMPARATIVE COMMUNIST POLITICS were The Politics of the European Communist States which appeared in 1967 and Comparatiue Communist Politics which appeared in 1972. They generalized upon the more historical and empirical studies which had appeared earlier in the 1960s: Communism in Romania, The Reluctant Ally: A Study of Communist Neo-Colonialism and The Break-up of the Soviet Empire. They established his reputation as one of the foremost scholars of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. This article will consider the main ideas of the two key works and relate them to broader trends in the evolution of his thinking. Chiefly, though, it will concentrate upon his 1967 work, since the 1972 one was much shorter and it also largely recapitulated the same ideas.

海南閩語結果結構

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Main Mechanism ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Southern Min ◽  
Archaic Chinese ◽  
Serial Verb Construction ◽  
Serial Verb ◽  
Chinese Dialects

This paper introduces the resultative constructions in Hainan Min which have not been seriously examined in previous studies. The serial verb construction (SVC) is the main mechanism by which resultatives are expressed in Hainan Min. This special syntactic structure is examined in Hainan Min and compared to two other Chinese dialects: Taiwan Southern Min and Cantonese. I speculate that the unusual serial verb construction resultatives are associated with the preservation of a historical form and language contact. Diachronic Chinese data are given to evince that SVCs existed early in archaic Chinese. In addition, it is argued that language contact with the native language (Hlai) also contributes to the preservation of this historic remnant. 本文介紹海南閩語的結果結構。這個語法結構在過去的文獻中並未清楚的描述及討論過。本研究使用的材料大多是作者田野調查後的語料。田調的結果發現，海南閩語的結果結構主要是以連動結構來表現。以連動結構來表達結果，在現代漢語中，是一種很特殊的方式。本文因此比較了相關的漢語方言：台灣閩南語及粵語。同時，還考察了古漢語的歷時語料，發現連動結果句型應是一種存古現象。除了歷史因素外，本文還主張語言接觸也影響了連動結果句型的存古。因此，本文還探討了海南島上的黎語之結果結構。(This article is in English.)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document