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Part of
East and West of The Pentacrest: Linguistic studies in honor of Paula Kempchinsky
Edited by Timothy Gupton and Elizabeth Gielau
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 33] 2021
► pp. 109–134

Chapter 6
Me gohtaba ehta linguaji barranquenha

Variable object clitics in Barranquenho

| Indiana University | Iowa City High School

The villa of Barrancos, Portugal, has a multilingual population that in addition to European Portuguese and Spanish also speaks an autochthonous contact variety, Barranquenho. Previous research on several phonological and morphosyntactic properties suggest Barranquenho is a mixed language albeit not a prototypical one. The current study analyzes 895 tokens of object clitics taken from a corpus of 20 native-speaker interviews and examines their placement, morphology and distribution in specific constructions. Results suggest that Barranquenho speakers possess a mixed clitic system containing both Spanish and Portuguese-like properties. The data also suggest a more Spanish-like placement pattern; one that is sensitive to finiteness rather than the presence/absence of various operators or morphophonological (PF) restrictions when interpreted in light of current approaches to the syntax of clitics. Moreover, this study has implications for existing typological models of contact varieties and point to future research regarding the application of syntactic models to these approaches.

Keywords: Clitic pronouns, Clitic placement, Spanish, European Portuguese, Mixed language
Article outline
  • Dedication
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Introduction to Barranquenho
    • 2.1Barranquenho as a mixed language
    • 2.2The evolutionary model of language change
  • 3.POCs in Spanish, European Portuguese and Barranquenho
  • 4.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Analysis
    • 5.2Exclusions
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Placement
    • 6.2Doubling
  • 7.General discussion
  • 8.Limitations and future research
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.33.06gar
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