The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics

W. Leo Wetzels, Sergio Menuzzi, João Costa

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118791851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of research within the Brazilian and European variants of the Portuguese language. It includes chapters focusing on the key areas of linguistic study, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, linguistic change, language variation and contact, and acquisition.

• Essential reference work for scholars of Portuguese linguistics and Romance languages
• Chapters written by an international team of research specialists highlight both the consensus and the controversies within the various subfields of Portuguese linguistics
• Examines Portuguese linguistics in relation to syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics/pragmatics, acquisition, and sociolinguistics
• Written in an accessible overview style and designed for advanced students and current scholars in the field alike
• Essential reference work for scholars of Portuguese linguistics and Romance languages

1
History and Current Setting

MARIA TERESA BROCARDO AND CÉLIA REGINA DOS SANTOS LOPES

1. From Latin to Portuguese—Main Linguistic changes and conditioning factors

The development of Portuguese can be traced back to Latin, whose establishment in the Iberian Peninsula was a consequence of the Roman conquest, initiated in 218 BCE, but completed only about 200 years later. In the early fifth century CE the peninsula was invaded by several Germanic tribes, among which was the Suebi, the only tribe that resisted after the arrival of another group of Germanic invaders, the Visigoths. The Visigoths, who eventually conquered the entire peninsula, were already Latin-speaking before they arrived. Of major importance for the linguistic history of the Ibero-Romance area is the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, starting in 711 CE. The northern territories of the peninsula were the refuge of the surviving Christian kingdoms, which would later expand southwards. The varieties of Latin spoken in those areas, where the Arabic influence was naturally more superficial, are at the origin of the Ibero-Romance languages.

Portuguese originally emerged in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula and later expanded southwards with the Christian Reconquest. This “initial” or “primitive” area of Portuguese roughly comprises what corresponds today to Galiza and part of northern Portugal (see Castro 2006: 64–67). Thus, the designation “Galician-Portuguese” is sometimes used in the literature to refer to this original language unity.

In the following description of the language-formation process, we discuss the linguistic features characteristic of the most ancient periods of Portuguese, signaling the most relevant differences within the Romance context, in particular those that are distinctive to the Ibero-Romance area, for which we take Castilian (Cast.) as our point of reference.

As a Romance language, Portuguese both continues Latin and diverges from it, which means that we can identify features that are diachronically characterizable as more conservative while others are of a more innovative nature. This type of contrast, recurrent in traditional approaches but also considered crucial for diachronic analyses in modern approaches (see Maiden, Smith, and Ledgeway 2011 who oppose “innovation” and “persistence” in their History of the Romance Languages), will serve as a guideline for our description.

Several vocalic features of Portuguese evidence tendencies of persistence. Among these features is the continuation of the Latin diphthong /aw/ as /ow/, while more generally in Romance it emerges as a monophthong (ouro “gold” < auru-, Cast. oro). This diphthong was preserved in Portuguese even in unstressed syllables (ousar “dare,” outono “autumn”). Exceptions are limited to a few forms with earlier monophtonghization (orelha “ear” < auric(u)la–, pobre “poor” < paupere–), sometimes already attested in (Vulgar) Latin. It should be noted that Portuguese /ow/ also originated from secondary */aw/, formed through distinct processes (amou “(he/she) loved” < amauit, soube “(he/she) knew” < sapuit, outro “other” < alteru–). Portuguese also preserves /ej/, a diphthong formed in Latin in cases where /j/ became adjacent to /ɛ/ or /a/ including cases where /j/ derived from a consonant, usually /k/ in coda position, also in contrast with the more innovative Cast. result (madeira “wood” < materia-, Cast. madera, leite “milk” < lacte–, Cast. leche).

The lack of diphthongization of the Latin vowels /ɛ/ < Ě and /ɔ/ < Ŏ also contrasts with their Castilian reflexes (erva “grass” < hěrba, Cast. hierba, morte “death” < mŏrte-, cast. muerte) and is different from the other Romance areas, in which diphthongization occurred in several phonological contexts. This feature is particularly relevant for the individualization of Portuguese, since it is indicative of a linguistic borderline between Portuguese and non-Portuguese varieties, including Castilian and some varieties of Leonese (Cintra 1983: 140). The Portuguese vowel system as it appears in stressed syllables is still identical to the one that emerged consequent to the loss of the Latin quantity oppositions, already attested in Latin sources, a system defined as “Proto-Western-Romance” (Vincent 1988: 32): /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/, /o/, /u/. Other phonological changes affected consonants, such as the evolution of the medial sequences /jt/, /lj/ and /jl/, where Portuguese preserved the sequence /jt/ and where /lj/ and /jl/ developed into /ʎ/, which contrast with the more innovative Castilian reflexes: oito “eight” < octo, Cast. ocho, folha “leaf” < folia, Cast. hoja, olho “eye” < oc(u)lu-, Cast. ojo.

Conservative tendencies are also manifest at other levels. If we assume that the personal infinitive is the continuation of the Latin imperfect subjunctive (Martins 2001), its formal preservation would represent a particularly conservative feature, since the Latin imperfect subjunctive survives elsewhere only in Sardinian (Vincent 1988: 47). The Latin pluperfect indicative is equally preserved in Portuguese (mostrara “(I) had shown” < monstrara(m)), as in Castilian, in contrast with the other Romance areas. In past stages of Castilian and Portuguese, pluperfect forms conveyed modal as well as temporal values, depending on the context of use, which later split to become a temporal category in contemporary Portuguese while functioning as a modal category in Spanish. Only later in the history of Portuguese would fully grammaticalized compound forms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 History and Current Setting
• 2 European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese
• 3 Portuguese in Contact
• 4 A Comparative Study of the Sounds of European and Brazilian Portuguese
• 5 Phonological Processes Affecting Vowels
• 6 Syllable Structure
• 7 Main Stress and Secondary Stress in Brazilian and European Portuguese
• 8 The Phonology–Syntax Interface
• 9 Intonation in European and Brazilian Portuguese
• 10 The Phonology and Morphology of Word Formation
• 11 The Morphology and Phonology of Inflection
• 12 Clitic Pronouns
• 13 The Null Subject Parameter and the Structure of the Sentence in European and Brazilian Portuguese
• 14 The Structure of DPs
• 15 Wh-movement
• 16 Null Objects and VP Ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese
• 17 Passives and Se Constructions
• 18 Binding and Pronominal Forms in Portuguese
• 19 The Semantics of DPs
• 20 Lexical Semantics
• 21 Tense and Aspect
• 22 Mood and Modality
• 23 Some Issues in Negation in Portuguese
• 24 Discourse Markers
• 25 From Latin to Portuguese
• 26 Main Morphosyntactic Changes and Grammaticalization Processes
• 27 Main Syntactic Changes from a Principle-and-Parameters View
• 28 Main Current Processes of Phonological Variation
• 29 Main Current Processes of Morphosyntactic Variation
• 30 Acquisition of Phonology
• 31 Acquisition of Portuguese Syntax
• 32 Second Language Acquisition
• Index
• End User License Agreement