LINGUISTICA LATINOAMERICANA - Böcker

This volume presents key results of the Estudo comparativo de variedades africanas, brasileiras e europeias do Português (ALFAL Project 21): (i) an overview of the results and new perspectives of analysis; (ii) the description of morphosyntactic phenomena in Portuguese varieties; and (iii) a discussion about methodological aspects fundamental to the development of comparative linguistic studies.

The volume offers in-depth analyses of contact situations between Spanish and other languages, showing how language variation and change are part of the complex linguistic dynamics that characterize contact areas. Aimed at contact linguistics experts, it gathers theoretical frameworks as well as case studies about these processes, both in diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

Spoken by millions of people on four continents, Portuguese remains a lesser studied language. To help improve the linguistic understanding of this pluricentric language, the present volume brings together ten studies about different grammatical phenomena observed in Portuguese varieties – from suffixation to intercalated temporal clauses and non-concatenative verbal inflection, among other topics. Focusing on two main axes – usage and cognition –, these studies draw on the theoretical frameworks of Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, but build a cohesive whole insofar as they all offer usage-based language approaches. By presenting an overview of recent research on Portuguese and its varieties, the book paves the way for the inclusion of Portuguese in the set of Neo-Latin languages best known to the general public.

This book explores the interaction between prosody and other research topics, in Brazilian Portuguese and beyond. Written by experts in the field, the contributions present a variety of studies that range from prosodic variation across languages to multimodal analysis of speech acts and common linguistic structures. It will be of interest for linguists, speech therapists, music researchers and psycholinguists alike.

Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and yet unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.

Are our concepts from prosodic typology, like word stress, pitch accent, head-/edge-prominence, really that tightly linked to individual languages? How are meanings often signaled via intonation in European languages, like information structure and sentence type, expressed in communicative acts between speakers who are bilingual in such a European language, Spanish, and one in which many of these meanings are expressed by morphology, Quechua? Based on semi-spontaneous dialogical elicitation data in both Spanish and Quechua gathered via fieldwork in the bilingual community of Huari, Peru, this work provides some challenging answers to these questions. Besides being the first detailed description of the prosody of a Central Quechuan language, it provides an in-depth study of the intonational systems and prosodic structures of the two languages and shows that their variation spaces overlap to a large extent, in turns exhibiting or not exhibiting evidence of word stress, pitch accents, lexical pitch accents in loanwords, and head- or edge-prominence.