230455 Introduction to the Linguistics of Brazilian Portuguese (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

The seminar addresses a number of key issues that have brought Brazilian Portuguese to the fore in both comparative Romance linguistics and general linguistics, including:

(1) the synchronic description of Brazilian Portuguese in comparison with European Portuguese. This comparison has been approached from a variety of theoretical frameworks, notably generative syntax, and revolves around key syntactic phenomena such as the loss or weakening of null-subject properties, the use of tonic object pronouns instead of clitics, the use of non-emphatic discontinuous negation and even sentence-final negation, and distinctive cleft constructions, among others;

(2) the diverse and fascinating sociolinguistic realities of Brazil, including differences between rural and urban varieties and between economically more and less privileged social groups, as well as the historical development of partially divergent grammatical systems in spoken and written language; and

(3) the extent to which the historical configuration of Brazilian Portuguese is related to its use as a second language by substantial sections of Brazil's population, including Indigenous populations, non-Portuguese European migrants (notably Germans), and Africans and their descendants. This perspective has become increasingly prominent in accounts of the historical development of Brazilian Portuguese and is closely related to the controversial hypothesis that Popular Brazilian Portuguese emerged through processes of contact-induced restructuring, sometimes described in terms of prior creolization and subsequent post-creolization.

Requirements for participation, required level

This seminar does not presuppose any previous knowledge of Portuguese, although familiarity with the rudiments of this language or another Romance language (particularly Portuguese's closest major 'sister' language, Spanish) may be advantageous