Directional complements, existential sentences and locatives in the Afro-Brazilian continuum of Portuguese

• In this chapter, we will focus on two set of changes reported in the literature on African and Brazilian varieties of Portuguese: (i) new uses of prepositions in directional complements of motion verbs and (ii) the emergence of ter (‘to have’) as a prototypically existential verb. Some facts involved in both changes will be presented to argue that there is a single factor responsible for triggering them in African and Brazilian Portuguese varieties: the transference of grammatical properties of phrases interpreted as locative from Bantu languages to Portuguese, with effects on the syntactic behavior of constituents introduced by the preposition em (‘in, at, on’).

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Angolan Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese

motion verbs

locatives

existential constructions

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)