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… read more
This chapter introduces the idea of a continuum of Portuguese in Africa and Brazil. It further identifies the common research questions, presenting earlier studies and discussing current gaps in research about Brazilian and African varieties of Portuguese. A detailed overview of the book explains… read more
This paper shows that some properties of possessive and existential sentences in Brazilian Portuguese can be properly explained if the possessive-existential verb ter ‘have’ is derived by the combination of the features associated with estar ‘be’ and the features corresponding to the comitative… read more
This paper characterizes the occurrence of the pronoun você ‘you’ in Brazilian
Portuguese existential clauses as an instance of an indeterminate pronoun, arguing
against the idea that it corresponds to an expletive. I present some evidence that você
is not directly merged in [Spec,TP], but in a… read more