The analysis of languages in contact: A case study through a variationist lens

Carvalho, Ana Maria

doi:10.20396/cel.v58i3.8647467

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Due to prolonged contact with Spanish, Uruguayan Portuguese is characterized by a heavy presence of Spanish loanwords and Spanish-Portuguese code-switching. In addition, the occurrence of vernacular Portuguese morphosyntactic and phonological variants and archaic words from rural Portuguese indicates that Uruguayan Portuguese has undergone fewer diachronic changes than Brazilian Portuguese (Elizaincín et al 1987;Carvalho 2016). In fact, Elizaincín et al (1987, p. 85) documented only the presence of lexical a gente in Uruguayan Portuguese, plus consistent use of nós as the first-person plural pronoun.…”

Section: Portuguese In Uruguaymentioning

confidence: 99%

When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border: The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier

Pacheco,

Carvalho,

Scherre

2024

Languages

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This study shows that the incorporation of the first-person plural pronoun a gente has not only reached the southernmost tip of the Brazilian territory, but has crossed the border and entered Uruguayan Portuguese, or varieties of Portuguese spoken in northern Uruguay by Portuguese–Spanish bilinguals. This finding is based on the quantification of the a gente/nós variable in sociolinguistic interviews carried out in two border communities: Aceguá, Brazil, and Aceguá, Uruguay. The analysis of interviews recorded on each side of the border yielded a total of 1000 tokens that were submitted to a multivariate analysis. Following the premises of comparative sociolinguistics, we compared the distribution of the variable on both sides of the border and found that although Uruguayans used a gente less often than Brazilians, this innovation, preferred by young speakers, is incorporated in both dialects, following similar linguistic paths. These results show that Uruguayan Portuguese has incorporated the pronominal a gente in its grammar in a clear sign of convergence towards Brazilian Portuguese and divergence from Spanish, despite the coexistence with Spanish that categorically uses nosotros as the first-person plural pronoun and reserves the cognate la gente for its purely lexical meaning ‘the people’.

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Section: Portuguese In Uruguaymentioning

confidence: 99%

When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border: The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier

Pacheco,

Carvalho,

Scherre

2024

Languages

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“…Unfortunately, the Variationist approach is often assumed to belong solely to the subfield of sociolinguistics. But in fact, numerous scholars use Labovian Variationist tools to discover the nature of grammar, how grammar develops during language acquisition, and whether/how it changes in situations of language contact (e.g., Carvalho, 2016; Erker & Otheguy, 2016; Geeslin, 2018; Guy, 2018; Labov, 1994; Nagy et al., 2011; Otheguy & Zentella, 2012; Poplack et al., 2018; Poplack & Torres Cacoullos, 2015; Schwenter, 2011; Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018; Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2012).…”

Section: Systematicity In Intraspeaker Variation or ‘Structured Varia...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Structured variation in child heritage speakers' grammars

Shin

2022

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Research on heritage language development in children can profit greatly by incorporating insights from analyses of structured variation, which is defined as the interchange of linguistic forms where the choice to use one form over the other is probabilistically conditioned by linguistic and social factors. This article reviews the limited research on bilingual children's structured variation, focussing specifically on child heritage speakers of Spanish. It is argued that careful attention to structured variation advances our understanding of heritage language development in childhood and can help us move beyond a deficit view of bilingualism.

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“…The stigma that Uruguayan Portuguese suffers is due partly to historical attempts to quash the use of Portuguese in Uruguayan schools (Elizaincín, 1992). Following Carvalho (2016), "Spanish was successfully imposed through obligatory public schooling and language policies, but Portuguese was maintained as a minority language" (p. 406). This, coupled with the fact that older speakers who live outside of the city itself tend to speak Portuguese the most, has led to the stereotype that Portuguese is a rural language spoken by older, typically not as well-educated Uruguayans (Carvalho, 2004;Waltermire, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

Gradoville

Waltermire

Long

2021

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and objectives: While previous research has shown that phonetic variation in language contact situations is affected by whether a word has a cognate in the contact language, this paper aims to show that such an effect is not monotonic. According to the usage-based model, items in memory are organized according to similarity, thus we anticipated that formally more similar cognates would show a stronger cognate effect. Methodology: This variationist sociophonetic study investigates the relationship between cognate similarity and phonetic realization. We examined this relationship in the bilingual community of Rivera, Uruguay, in which both Portuguese and Spanish are spoken with regularity. Specifically, we focused on intervocalic /d/, which in monolingual Spanish is realized as an approximant [ð̞] or phonetic zero, but in monolingual Brazilian Portuguese is produced as a stop [d] or, in most varieties, an affricate [ʤ] before [i]. Data and analysis: We analyzed a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of the Spanish spoken in Rivera. Acoustic measurements were taken from approximately 60 tokens each from 40 different speakers. Using a linear mixed-effects model, we examined the relationship between several predictors and the degree of constriction of intervocalic /d/. Findings/conclusions: While there is an overall frequency effect whereby more frequent words exhibit less constriction of intervocalic /d/, as both frequency and cognate similarity increase, less constriction of intervocalic /d/ obtains. Therefore, frequent cognates in Portuguese that have very similar forms affect the production of intervocalic /d/ more so than other cognates. Originality: No previous study has demonstrated that the cognate effect on phonetic variation in a situation of language contact is regulated by form similarity between cognate pairs. Significance/implications: The data support the usage-based model in that similar cognates have more lexical connections and can therefore show greater influence on phonetic realization than can cognates that share less phonetic material.

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The analysis of languages in contact: A case study through a variationist lens

Cited by 11 publications

References 42 publications

When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border: The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier

When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border: The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier

Structured variation in child heritage speakers' grammars

Cognate similarity and intervocalic /d/ production in Riverense Spanish

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