Part of
Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos GramaticaisEdited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 135–150
In this paper I propose (a) that Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French underwent a very similar diachronic development of wh-questions; (b) that the great structural change in both languages was the loss of long wh-movement with the appearance of a short wh-movement to a position of Focus left-adjacent to vP. This change also affected cleft sentences, turning inverse clefts into canonic clefts. The other variants resulted from phonological reduction and do not constitute syntactic “doublets”, but stylistic ones.