Ana M. Carvalho – författare

This handbook brings together leading experts in the field to provide a comprehensive overview of the principal historical and contemporary aspects of the Portuguese language from a wide range of perspectives. The first part of the volume explores the main structural characteristics of Portuguese, featuring extensive cross-dialectal comparisons, while the second offers multiple analyses of the language from different theoretical traditions. The chapters in Part III examine the main diachronic developments in Portuguese, introduce the historical, geographical, and social aspects of the origins and expansions of the language, and provide the main features of each of the eight national varieties. Part IV highlights the crucial role that language contact has played in shaping many Portuguese varieties across the world, while Part V investigates the acquisition and teaching of Portuguese. In the final part the focus shifts to how the language is perceived by society: chapters discuss language attitudes, perceptions, and ideologies, as well as efforts to standardize Portuguese; the final chapter explores recent proposals to counter linguistic discrimination and foster linguistic respect. The Oxford Handbook of the Portuguese Language will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students as well as established scholars, whether they are specialists in Portuguese linguistics or researchers in a related field looking to learn more about the language.

Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression. The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties - Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular - and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.