Cover not available
Part of
Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 135–150

Chapter 5
Wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French

| Universidade Estadual de Campinas

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.

Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese, Quebec French, structural change, phonological change, wh-movement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The diachronic evolution of wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French
    • 1.2Theoretical assumptions
  • 2.The analysis
    • 2.1The loss of the wh-V2 pattern
    • 2.2The entry of the cleft question of the inverse type
    • 2.3The loss of long wh-movement
    • 2.4From inverse-wh-clefts to canonic wh-clefts
    • 2.5The apparent double filled Comp pattern
    • 2.6The appearance of wh-SV, the last innovation
      • 2.6.1First hypothesis
      • 2.6.2Second hypothesis
  • 3.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.260.05kat
References
Ambar, Manuela
1992 Para uma sintaxe da inversão sujeito-verbo em Português. Lisboa: Colibri.Google Scholar
Ambar, Manuela, Kato, Mary A., Mioto, Carlos & Veloso, Rita
2001 Padrões de interrogativas-Q no Português Europeu e no Português Brasileiro: Uma análise inter e intra-lingüística. Boletim da Associação Brasileira de Linguística 26: 400–404. Fortaleza.Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana
2004 Aspects of” the low IP area”. In The Structure of IP and CP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2, Luigi Rizzi (ed.), 15–51. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Lasnik, Howard
1977 Filters and control. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 425–504.Google Scholar
Duarte, Maria Eugenia & Kato, Mary A.
2002 A diachronic analysis of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions. Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies VI: 326–339.Google Scholar
Elsig, Martin
2009 Grammatical Variation across Space and Time: The French interrogative system [Studies in Language Variation 3]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, C.-T. James
1982 Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A.
2013 Deriving wh-in-situ through movement. In Information Stucture and Agreement [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 197], Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jimenez-Fernández, Javier Martin-Gonzales & Marioano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 175–191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Focus and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese. In Linguistic Variation: Confronting Fact and Theory, Nathalie Dion, André Lapierre & Rena Torres Cacoullos (eds), 111–130. London Routledge.Google Scholar
2018 Morphological doublets in Brazilian Portuguese wh-constructions. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY, Lori Repetti & Francisco Ordoñez (eds), 135–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 As interrogativas-Q e as estruturas de foco na diacronia e sincronia do PB. In Português Brasileiro: Uma segunda viagem diacrônica, Charlotte Galves, Mary Aizawa Kato & Ian Roberts (eds), 313–336. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A. & Mioto, Carlos
2005 A multi-evidence study of European and Brazilian wh-questions. In Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives, Stephan Kepser & Marga Reis (eds), 307–328. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kato, Mary A. & Raposo, Eduardo
1996 European and Brazilian word order: Questions, focus and topic constructions. In Aspects of Romance Linguistics, Claudia Parodi, Carlos Quicoli, Mario Saltarelli & Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta (eds), 267–277. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A. & Ribeiro, Ilza
2009 Cleft sentences from old Portuguese to Modern Brazilian Portuguese. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages [Studies in Language Companion Series 112], Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 123–154. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kayne, Richard
1994 The Antysymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kroch, Antony
1994 Morphosyntactic variation. In: Katherine Beals, Jeannette Denton, Robert Knippen, Lynette Melnar, Hisami Suzuki and Erica Zeinfeld (eds). Papers from the 30th Regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parassession on Variation and Linguistic Theory. 180-201. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Lessa de Oliveira, Adriana
2003 Aquisição do constituinte-Qu em dois dialetos do português brasileiro. MA thesis, UNICAMP.Google Scholar
Lopes-Rossi, Maria Aparecida
1996 A sintaxe diacrônica das interrogativas-Q do Português. PhD dissertation, UNICAMP.Google Scholar
Myagawa, Shigeru
2001 The EPP, scrambling, and wh-in situ. In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), 293–338. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Noonan, Maire
1989 Operator licensing and the case of French interrogatives. In: Proceedings of the 8th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 315-330. University of British Columbia.Google Scholar
1992 Case and Syntactic Geometry. PhD dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Ordonẽz, Francisco & Olarrea, Antonio
2006 Microvariation in Caribbean/non-Caribbean Spanish. Probus 18(3): 59–97.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Ilza
1995 Evidence for a verb-second phase in Old Portuguese. In Clause Structure and Language Change, Adrian Battye & Ian Roberts (eds). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi
1997 The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281–338. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Ian
1993 Verbs and Diachronic Syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Tailleur, Sandrine
2014 The French wh-interrogative system: Evolution and clefting. In Variation within and across Romance Languages [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 333], Marie-Hélène Côté & Eric Mathieu (eds), 315–330. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Torres-Morais, Maria Aparecida
1993 Aspectos diacrônicos do movimento do verbo, estrutura a frase e caso nominativo do português do Brasil. In Português Brasileiro: Uma viagem diacrônica, Ian Roberts & Mary Aizawa Kato (eds), 263–306. Campinas: Editora UNICAMP.Google Scholar
Uriagereka, Juan
1995 An F position in Western Romance. In Discourse Configurational Languages, Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), 65–98. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, M.L.
1998 Word Order, Prosody and Focus. Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press.Google Scholar