1

THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF BRAZILIAN

VERNACULAR PORTUGUESE

by

Heliana Ribeiro de Mello

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The
City University of New York.

1996
 2

II

© 1996

HELIANA RIBEIRO DE MELLO

All rights reserved

 3

III
This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in
Linguistics in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

_____________________ ________________________________
Date Dr. John A. Holm
Chair of Examining Committee

______________________ ________________________________
Date Dr. Charles Cairns
Executive Officer

________________________________
Dr. Edward Bendix

________________________________
Dr. Ricardo Otheguy

________________________________
Dr. Armin Schwegler

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

 4

IV

Abstract

THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF BRAZILIAN VERNACULAR

PORTUGUESE

by

Heliana Ribeiro de Mello

Adviser: Prof. John A. Holm

This dissertation is a study of the linguistic factors and processes that led to
the formation of Brazilian vernacular Portuguese (BVP).

Chapter one examines present-day BVP varieties that have contributed to this
language's origins, also introducing a brief comparison of BVP and some
varieties of nonstandard American Spanish.

Chapter two is an overview of the linguistic literature on BVP, including the

many different approaches to its genesis that have been proposed over the
last one hundred years.

Chapter three discusses the social history of BVP's speakers and the light it
casts on the evolution of this language.

Chapter four examines the distinguishing features of BVP making a

comparison with similar features in archaic Portuguese as well as
Portuguese-based creoles. It is shown that these distinguishing features are
pervasive on the lexical, phonological and grammatical levels of BVP,
 5

clearly setting it apart from standard Brazilian Portuguese and European

V
Portuguese.

Chapter five is a detailed analysis of the linguistic processes likely to have

taken part in the formation of BVP, leading to the conclusion that both
language internal processes (e.g. drift), and language external processes (e.g.
contact phenomena such as borrowing and shift) interacted and played
important roles. It is shown that some of BVP's features clearly come from
just one source, but others seem to have resulted from converging influences.
 6

VI

Acknowledgments

I am deeply obliged to Prof. John Holm, my dissertation adviser, for his

unfailing support, encouragement, assistance and advice throughout my
entire graduate education at CUNY. My sincere thanks go to the other
members of my dissertation committee: Prof. Edward Bendix (CUNY), Prof.
Ricardo Otheguy (CUNY) and Prof. Armin Schwegler (UC-Irvine) for their
interest in my research, their guidance and careful reading of the dissertation.

My appreciation also goes to the other faculty at CUNY and many scholars I
met along the way, who helped me shape my background in linguistics. My
fellow students were always very gracious in exchanging ideas and sharing
their own research interests in many classes and seminars. My thanks go
especially to Gerardo Lorenzino and Kate Green. Ms. Judith Tucker was also
of great assistance with practical and bureaucratic matters.

I was very fortunate to have the support and encouragement of Prof. Mary F.
do Careno from Universidade Estadual Paulista and Prof. Alzira T. de
Macedo from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, who so generously
shared their knowledge and research data on Brazilian Portuguese with me. I
am also grateful to Prof. Márcia Cançado from Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, who kindly provided essencial literature only available in
Brazil.

I send my thanks to my informants in Brazil, who allowed their speech to be

recorded as a part of my collection of data.

I am very thankful to CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento

Científico e Tecnológico of Brazil for financial support from 1991until
 7

VII

1995.

I am immensely indebted to all my family and friends for their love and
support throughout the years. Their encouragement has always been vital to
me. Emília Bruno, Eduardo Miranda, Marta Losada, Rafael Gutierrez, Renata
Mancini and Samuel Toffoli were indispensable in making my graduate
school years a lot more fun. I could never repay Renata Mancini for taking
such good care of my baby son in the long hours I needed to finish writing
this dissertation.

There is no end to the thanks to my husband, Ricardo Nunes, who endured it

all with me, always loving, patient and supportive, never failing to help me
put things into perspective and to keep the spirits high.

My love goes to my darling son Guilherme, who has brought so much joy
into my life, making the writing of this dissertation much more pleasant.
 8

VIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.0 General remarks.......................................................... 1

1.1 Vernacular language varieties in Brazil.......................... 6
1.1.1 The dialect of Helvécia......................................... 7
1.1.2 The dialect of João Ramalho................................. 9
1.1.3 The Ribeira Valley dialect.................................... 11
1.2 African language remnants and a creole in Brazil........... 13
1.2.1 The secret language of Cafundó............................ 14
1.2.2 The language of the Negro da Costa...................... 17
1.2.3 Lanc-Patuá......................................................... 20
1.3 Parallels between BVP and vernacular Spanish
in the Caribbean......................................................... 22
1.4 Summary................................................................... 26
 9

IX

Chapter 2
Overview of the literature

2.0 General remarks.......................................................... 28

2.1 From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century......... 30
2.2 Mid-twentieth century studies....................................... 33
2.3 The 1960's and 1970's................................................. 34
2.4 Work on BVP in Brazil: 1980's.................................... 37
2.5 Work on BVP in Brazil: 1990's.................................... 39
2.6 Africanist and creolist approaches to BVP..................... 43
2.7 Summary................................................................... 49

Chapter 3
Sociohistorical background of BVP

3.0 General remarks........................................................ 51

3.1 Population patterns in early colonial Brazil.................. 53
 10

3.2 The historical background of BVP.............................. 58

3.2.1 Language patterns in colonial Brazil.................... 60
X

3.2.1.1 The initial contact between the

Portuguese, indigenous peoples, and
Africans............................................. 60
3.2.1.2 Portuguese immigration patterns........... 69
3.2.2 Slavery and language contact in Brazil................. 70
3.2.2.1 The beginnings (1532-1654)................. 71
3.2.2.2 The golden era (1654-1808)................. 75
3.2.2.3 From the arrival of the royal family to
the end of slavery (1808-1888)............. 79
3.3 The relationship between demographics and language
development in colonial Brazil.................................... 84
3.4 Summary.................................................................. 89

Chapter 4
Distinguishing features of BVP

4.0 General remarks........................................................ 91

4.1 Lexico-semantics....................................................... 94
4.2 Phonology................................................................102
4.2.1 Phonotactic rules...............................................103
 11

4.2.2 Phonological aspects of morphological processes..110

XI

4.3 Morphology..............................................................113
4.3.1 Noun Phrase number agreement..........................113
4.3.2 Noun Phrase gender agreement...........................118
4.3.3 Subject-verb agreement......................................121
4.3.4 Verb tenses........................................................129
4.3.5 Pronouns: case marking......................................133
4.3.6 Word formation processes...................................137
4.4 Syntax.......................................................................139
4.4.1 Verb Phrase.......................................................139
4.4.1.1 Serial verbs..........................................139
4.4.1.2 Existential 'ter'.....................................144
4.4.1.3 Predicate negation.................................146
4.4.1.4 Reflexivization and quasi passivization....153
4.4.2 Noun Phrase.......................................................156
4.4.2.1 Definite reference.................................156
4.4.2.2 Overt subject pronoun...........................159
4.4.2.3 Possession............................................161
4.4.3 Prepositions.......................................................162
4.4.4 Word order........................................................167
4.4.4.1 Interrogative sentences...........................167
 12

4.4.4.2 Topicalization.......................................169
4.4.4.3 Highlighting..........................................170
XII

4.4.4.4 Relative clauses......................................174

4.4.4.5 Zero object anaphora..............................178
4.5 Summary.....................................................................181

Chapter 5
The development of Brazilian vernacular Portuguese

5.0 General remarks........................................................183

5.1 Theoretical framework...............................................184
5.1.1 Internal developmental tendencies of Portuguese
dialects and the preservation of archaic features....186
5.1.2 Language contact processes..................................190
5.1.2.1 Language borrowing.............................190
5.1.2.2 Language shift......................................193
5.1.2.3 Creolization and decreolization...............195
5.1.2.4 Semi-creolization...................................198
5.2 The linguistic interplay.................................................201
5.2.1 The European Portuguese linguistic input...............201
 13

5.2.1.1 Archaic Portuguese syntax......................202

5.2.1.2 Archaic Portuguese phonology................205
XIII

5.2.2 The Amerindian linguistic input............................210

5.2.3 The African linguistic input..................................218
5.2.3.1 African influence on phonology..............221
5.2.3.2 African influence on morphosyntax.........224
5.2.3.3African influence on lexicon....................225
5.2.4 The West African pidgin/creole input....................229
5.3 Language change.........................................................237
5.3.1 Language drift....................................................239
5.3.2 Dialect leveling...................................................250
5.3.3 Language contact.................................................253
5.4 Summary....................................................................269

Chapter 6
Conclusion.........................................................................272

Appendix........................................................................... 276

References..........................................................................287
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XIV

List of maps and graphs

Map 1 Colonial Brazil..................................................... 64

Graph 1 Brazilian population in 1587................................ ...74
Graph 2 Brazilian slave population by region - 1819.............. 81
Graph 3 Population distribution by ethnic groups in Brazil
from 1538 to 1890................................................ 86

List of tables

Table 1 Brazilian population in 1587..................................... 73

Table 2 Regional Brazilian slave population compared to
total regional population in 1819.............................. 80
Table 3 Regional Brazilian slave population compared to
total regional population in 1872.............................. 82
Table 4 Population distribution by ethnic groups in Brazil
from 1538 to 1890.................................................. 85
Table 5 Words of African origin..........................................101
Table 6 Agreement rule in the dialect of Helvécia..................119
Table 7 Final -s deletion......................................................243
 15

XV

LIST OF SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

~v: nasal vowel

E: lax mid front vowel
Ω: lax mid back vowel
¥: palatal lateral
ANP: anaphor
ANT: anterior tense
AP: archaic Portuguese
BP: Brazilian Portuguese
BVP: Brazilian vernacular Portuguese
CV: Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese
DIM: diminutive
EP: European Portuguese
FEM: feminine
GB: Guiné-Bissau Creole Portuguese
HAB: habitual aspect
INF: infinitive
MAS: masculine
 16

NP: noun phrase

NPA: noun phrase number agreement
NEG: negation
XVI

P: Portuguese
PL: plural
PR: Principense Creole Portuguese
PRES: present tense
PRET: preterit tense
REL: relativizer
REF: reflexive pronoun
SBP: standard Brazilian Portuguese
SING: singular
SP: Spanish
ST: São Tomense Creole Portuguese
SVA: subject-verb agreement
TOP: topic
UNM: unmarked personal pronoun
VP: verb phrase
 17

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.0 General remarks

The linguistic situation in contemporary Brazil is complex and offers a

wealth of research topics for linguists. Although the Brazilian layman's view
is that the population of the country is monolingual in Portuguese, the reality
is far different. Rodrigues (1993:92) calculates that there are around 180
indigenous languages still alive in Brazil today. Some of the European and
Asian languages immigrants brought to Brazil at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries, despite their limited area of
influence, are still spoken by those immigrants' bilingual descendants. There
are reports of remnants of African languages in some isolated Afro-Brazilian
communities (cf. Queiroz 1984, Vogt et al. 1980), and there is also a French-
based creole language spoken in the state of Amapá, in northern Brazil. The
 18

latter, which is called Lanc-Patuá, was brought to Brazil primarily from

Cayenne in French Guiana, but also had inputs from creole speakers from
Guyana, Barbados, Suriname, Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia (cf.
Andrade 1984). 1 Besides all these language varieties, Portuguese is the
official language of the country, with numerous regional dialectal variants as
well as the standard form of the language.

This dissertation will focus on the origins and development of Brazilian

vernacular Portuguese (henceforth BVP). This term in reality refers to a
continuum of dialects, which for the sake of convenience will usually be
treated together under one label unless internal differences make it necessary
to refer to specific lects. BVP refers to the language varieties spoken mostly
by the illiterate or nearly illiterate rural population and generally by urban
people belonging to the lower social strata in Brazil (cf. Bortoni-Ricardo
1985, and Orlandi et al. 1989). The label BVP will be used in this
dissertation to refer to the local vernacular dialects spoken in colonial Brazil
as well as to contemporary ones, therefore implying a development
continuity between the former and the latter. As will be shown in chapter
four, BVP presents a large number of features that distinguish it from
standard Brazilian Portuguese on all linguistic levels, that is, in its lexico-
semantics, phonology and morphosyntax. The varieties of BVP most

1Another French-based creole called Karipuna is spoken as a first language by a population of about five
hundred mixed Amerindians in the Uaçá Indian Reservation, in the state of Amapá [cf. Holm (1989:381)].
 19

divergent from standard Brazilian Portuguese, which lie in one end of the
continuum, are spoken in Afro-Brazilian communities that apparently have
been relatively isolated from mainstream Brazilian society, thus undergoing
less pressure from more standardized dialects. These dialects have non-
Portuguese features such as variable lack of gender agreement in the NP and
only one verbal form for all persons in some tenses. On the other hand,
dialectal varieties which are better represented in the middle of the BVP
continuum are usually spoken by the rural population and have such features
as only two distinguishing forms for some tenses (first person singular and a
generalized third person singular form for all other persons) and lack of NP
number agreement. The varieties at the less restructured 2 end of the BVP
continuum typically have variable NP number agreement, variable subject-
verb agreement and variable case marking on personal pronouns. The non-
standard features present in the less restructured varieties of BVP are also
present in the mid-continuum varieties and in the most restructured varieties,
but not vice-versa.

There is no one specific ethnic group that speaks BVP; it is rather an

individual's geographic region, level of schooling and socio-economic status
that determine whether he or she speaks a given BVP dialect. For all

2 The term restructuring will be used in this dissertation meaning the reorganization of a language's
grammar and lexicon which leads to the formation of a language variety divergent from its original source,
as in pidginization, creolization, semi-creolization, etc. BVP is seen here as a partially restructured
offspring of European Portuguese.
 20

practical purposes, the only comparisons made in this work are those that
involve BVP, standard Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth SBP), standard and
regional European Portuguese (EP), and those features shared by both
standard varieties, which will be represented simply by the symbol P
(Portuguese). All data used in this dissertation are from my own fieldwork
notes and native speaker knowledge of SBP and BVP, unless otherwise
specified. 3

The main questions addressed in this dissertation will be these:

1- what were the socio-linguistic factors that played a determining
role in the genesis and development of BVP;
2- what linguistic processes shaped the language throughout
centuries, making it grow apart from both standard Brazilian
Portuguese and European Portuguese?

In the process of examining the data and the theories that shed light on the
formation of BVP, conventional linguistic technical terms will be used.
These are mostly agreed upon among linguists; however, a few need explicit
definition given the multiple uses they have in the literature. Such is the case
for the terms pidgin, creole, creole continuum and semi-creole, which are
defined below. Pidgins are registers which do not have native speakers and

3All data used in this dissertation, other than my own, are from material already published, such as
dissertations, folktales and poems (cf. Cascudo 1955, Castro e Couto 1961, Andrade 1976, Cláudio 1980)
and are identified as such.
 21

are primarily used as a means of communication among people who do not

share any common language. In addition, 'pidgins are languages lexically
derived from other languages, but which are structurally simplified,
especially in their morphology', according to Bakker (1995:25) . Creoles are
natural languages, spoken as a mother tongue by a whole community, which
have not originated through intrasystemic changes from a single parent
language. Creoles usually have in their past a history of contact between
several languages which through pidginization first, and later nativization,
give rise to a new language. Many linguists argue that it is not possible to
characterize creoles through a set of grammatical features, and instead
suggest that their social history is what groups them together (cf. Holm 1988
and Muysken 1988). The term creole continuum refers to the varieties of the
same creole language spoken by a given linguistic community. Rooij
(1995:54) characterizes a creole continuum as being non-discrete and
unidimensional meaning that discrete boundaries between the varieties of a
creole do not exist because the basilect, the mesolects and the acrolect form a
gradient scale that shade into one another. On the other hand, Rooij (idem)
claims that a creole continuum is unidimensional because the varieties that
make it up only differ from one another in being more or less creole or
lexifier-like, and can therefore be ordered along a single, creole-lexifier
dimension. Semi-creoles are languages that never underwent full
creolization, but rather were affected by partial restructuring or borrowing of
creole features from a creole (cf. Holm 1991 and Muysken and Smith 1995).
 22

In this study, I argue for multiple origins for BVP. As will be shown by the
socio-historic and linguistic evidence presented in the chapters ahead, it is
more likely for the interaction of diverse processes such as dialect leveling,
first-language interference, language shift and language borrowing to have
given rise to BVP rather than any single one of these processes alone.

We hope that a better understanding of our language will cast light on the
intimately related issue of the development of our culture and national
identity.

1.1 Vernacular language varieties in Brazil

In this section we will be concerned with those vernacular language varieties

in Brazil which are held to be important in understanding the genesis and
development of BVP, and are representative of the structure of the latter.
These are all rural dialects that share many of the common features of BVP.
Among them, the dialect of Helvécia (see 1.1.1) has a number of features that
are not common in most BVP varieties, a fact that is likely to mirror this
dialect's origin, which may be, at least in part, distinct from the broader BVP
varieties that are under scrutiny in this dissertation. Although we will not
discuss the genesis of these rural dialects in this chapter, it is instructive to
keep in mind that all of them are spoken in areas in which a great deal of
language contact took place, being spoken by descendants of African slaves
 23

who had to abandon their native languages and ultimately adopt Portuguese.
As will be discussed in chapter five, BVP varieties with a clearer previous
history of language contact are more likely to throw light in finding the
processes that gave origin to the distinct features of BVP as a whole.

1.1.1 The dialect of Helvécia

Helvécia is a small town in the south of the state of Bahia. The first
linguistic analysis of its dialect was published by Ferreira (1985), the result
of fieldwork carried out in 1961. She described Helvécia as an isolated Afro-
Brazilian community whose dialect showed vestiges of creolization. The
dialect of Helvécia seems to have been formed under special circumstances,
since the farms in the area were owned by Swiss and German immigrants in
the nineteenth century. This fact indicates that some of the Portuguese
linguistic input that the slaves in the Helvécia region received was actually
the Portuguese spoken as a second language by the slave owners. This fact
alone may set the dialect of Helvécia apart from other BVP dialects.
However, in order to better understand the degree of restructuring found in
other BVP dialects it is helpful to imagine that today the dialect of Helvécia
is at the most basilectal end of a continuum of BVP varieties, with less
restructured varieties in between, and urban BVP at the least restructured
end. This continuum structure parallels that of Black English vernacular, in
which some place Gullah at the most basilectal end and urban Black English
 24

varieties at the most acrolectal end (cf. Traugott 1979).

Ferreira (1985) identified a number of features found in the dialect of

Helvécia which are also common in other rural Brazilian dialects, such as:

1- use of /y/ in place of the palatal lateral /¥/: cf.veya for Pvelha 'old
woman';
2- alternation between /v/ and /b/: cf. suvaco and subaco for P sovaco
'arm pit';
3- apheresis: cf. marrô for P amarrou 'she/he tied';
4- apocope: cf.cabritî for P cabritinho 'little goat';
5- metathesis: cf. vremeyo for Pvermelho 'red';
6- reanalysis of morpheme boundaries: cf. zoy grande for P os olhos
grandes 'the-pl big eyes';
7- lack of number agreement marking in plural verbal forms: cf. fiko
tre for P ficaram três 'there remained three'.

She also listed the following features as being specific to the Helvécia
dialect, which led her to argue for a possible previous creolization:

1- use of /õ/ in place of /ã˜u/: cf. coraçõ for P coração 'heart';

2- absence of definite articles: cf. quando abri ø janela for P quando
abri a janela 'when I opened the window';
3- absence of gender agreement in the NP, with the use of the masculine
 25

as the unmarked form: cf. o casa for P a casa 'the-fem house-fem';

4- use of a single verb form for all persons in the present and
preterit: cf. io nõ dómi for P eu não durmo 'I can't sleep' and in
io esqueceu for P eu esqueci 'I forgot';
5- use of non-finite verbal forms in place of finite ones: cf.eli
morrê for P ele morreu 'he died'.

The Helvécia dialect has more recently been studied through quantification
analysis (cf. Baxter 1992) in order to test the hypothesis of previous
creolization. From the evidence in favor of the previous creolization
hypothesis in Baxter (forthcoming), it can be suggested that the Helvécia
dialect is the most conservative variety of BVP studied so far, which puts it at
the most basilectal end of the BVP continuum.

1.1.2 The dialect of João Ramalho

João Ramalho is a small isolated Afro-Brazilian community in the state of

São Paulo. The Brazilian vernacular Portuguese dialect spoken by its
population was briefly described in Spera and Ribeiro (1989) who mainly
focused on the lexical divergences between the dialect and SBP; however,
they also made a few phonological notes, observing that on the phonological
level, speakers (especially the older ones) made the following substitutions:
 26

1- intervocalic /l/ for /r/, as in: aleia for P areia 'sand' and oleya for
P orelha 'ear';
2- /l/ for /n/, as in luvem for P nuvem 'cloud';
3- pre-consonantal /s/ for /r/, as in lagasto for P lagarto 'lizard'.

At the lexical level, the authors noted the frequent usage of archaic
Portuguese items, words that had undergone phonetic changes, and others of
unknown origin. There was considerable variation of forms among the
speakers of the community, which the authors did not attempt to account for.
Some of the most remarkable lexical forms are:

(1) luma, l˜ua for P lua 'moon'

(2) soli for P sol 'sun'
(3) estela d'aga for P estrela d'alva 'morning star'
(4) chuva de fulô/flô/frô for P chuva de pedra 'hail'
(5) alibu for P urubu 'vulture'
(6) goto, saluço for P soluço 'hiccup' 4
(7) estamo, corco, cóico, bucho, ziria for P estômago 'stomach'
(8) quiqui, fubaco, subaco for P sovaco 'armpit'
(9) oleya, orea, ureya, zorea for P orelha 'ear'
(10) monturu, bagaço for P lixo 'garbage'

4 Note that in a narrow transcription of the data, all non-stressed, word final o s should actually be
transcribed as [u].
 27

(11) boboya for P bolha 'bubble'

Spera and Ribeiro also observed that in the dialect of João Ramalho
diminutive forms tended to be used much more frequently than in other BVP
dialects. Also a large number of tabu words were substituted by avoidance
forms, such as cãozinho 'little dog' for the devil. 5

1.1.3 The Ribeira Valley dialect

The study of the rural dialect of Ribeira Valley was carried out in three Afro-
Brazilian communities (São Pedro, Abobral and Nhunguara) in the township
of Eldorado Paulista, a mountainous area in the south of the state of São
Paulo. Careno (1992) is a dissertation reporting the results of that fieldwork,
paying special attention to phonetics. Among her findings, Careno mentions
the tendency towards the loss of post-tonic segments, as in the following
examples:

(12) cosca for P cócega 'tickle'

(13) abobra for P abóbora 'pumpkin'
(14) corgo for P córrego 'stream'
(15) árvri for P árvore 'tree'

5 See section 1 of appendix for a further sample of this dialect.

 28

(16) musga for P música 'music'

(17) exérçu for P exército 'army'
(18) Penápis for P Penápolis
(19) títu for P título 'title'
(20) quilômi for P quilômetro 'kilometer'

Careno also reports the use of archaic Portuguese lexical forms, such as:

(21) dicumentu for P documento 'document'

(22) hispedá for P hospedar 'to host'
(23) cibola for P cebola 'onion'
(24) fruita for P fruta 'fruit'
(25) pricurav~u for P procuravam 'they looked for'
(26) mode a for P a fim de 'so that'
(27) suzinha for P sozinha 'alone-FEM'
(28) sumana for P semana 'week'
(29) iscuitá for P escutar 'to hear'

Careno (1992) introduces data showing variable lack of number and gender
agreement in the NP. Some examples of lack of NP number agreement are:

(30) duas cuié for P duas colheres 'two spoons'

(31) us crenti for P os crentes 'the protestants'
(32) us pai for P os pais 'the parents'
 29

Variable gender agreement is not common in other BVP dialects; however, it

seems to be fairly frequent in the Ribeira Valley dialect, as Careno shows
with the following examples:

(33) nossu cumid' ['our-MASC food-FEM'] for P nossa comida

(34) a vida da genti era muitu proibidu ['our-FEM life-FEM was very-MASC
prohibited-MASC'] for P a vida da gente era muito proibida
(35) a casa estava cheiu ['the-FEM house-FEM was full-MASC'] for P a casa
estava cheia

1.2 African language remnants and a creole in Brazil

In this section there will be discussed those language varieties in

contemporary Brazil that although not bearing an attested role in the
formation of BVP, are illustrative of the kinds of phenomena that are prone
to occur in a language contact situation. Firstly, two local remnants of
African languages will be examined according to the data provided by the
scholars who studied them, and secondly an overview of an attested French-
based creole language spoken in Brazil will be presented. The latter,
although not Portuguese-based, is representative of the kinds of language
restructuring that may possibly occur in a language contact situation.
 30

1.2.1 The secret language of Cafundó

Cafundó is a rural Afro-Brazilian village, located in the township of Salto de

Pirapora, in the state of São Paulo. Its population speaks the local BVP rural
variety, and also a language which they call 'African' that functions as a
secret code used only between members of the community.

Cafundó was studied by Fry, Vogt and Gnerre in a series of articles (e.g.
1980, 1981, 1985a) approaching the language and its speakers'
sociolinguistic situation from an anthropological perspective.

The small land holdings in Cafundó seem to have originally been part of a
farm that was later donated to ex-slaves by its owner after the abolition of
slavery in 1888. The language of Cafundó apparently emerged as a secret
code, expressing the solidarity and cultural links among its speakers.

According to Vogt and Fry (1985a), the Cafundó language is in reality

mostly Kimbundo and Kikongo lexicon with a local BVP structure. This
observation seems to be accurate, given the data the researchers collected in
their fieldwork, as shown in the following example (ibid.,19):
 31

(36) Cafundó: Arambuá está com caxite vavuru 6

BVP: Cachorro está com cheiro ruim
'The dog has a bad smell'
(cf. Kimbundu mbuá 'dog') 7

As can be seen in (36), there is a word for word correspondence between

Cafundó and BVP, and a Portuguese verb and preposition are used to connect
the NPs.

Another example of Cafundó is presented in (37) below (ibid., 11):

(37) Cafundó: No injó do Turupã formou lá um injequé vavuru

BVP: Na casa de Deus (= céu) formou lá um saco grande

do vava e cuendou o andurú vavuru

de água (= nuvem) e mandou o fogo grande (= raio)

e cuipou o nhamanhara

6The construction está com literally 'is with' is a Bantu idiom meaning 'have'; therefore, relexification may
have worked both ways.

7The etyma provided on this section are from Maia (1964).

 32

e matou o homem

'In God's house (heaven, sky) there formed a big bag of water
(cloud) and (it) sent the big fire (thunderbolt) and killed the
man'

(cf. Kimbundu inzo 'house', nzeke 'bag', ovava 'water', kuendesa 'to
send')

In (37), as in (36) above, there is a word for word correspondence between

Cafundó and BVP. Portuguese function words are used with lexical items
(nouns, adjectives and verbs) of African origin. It is also interesting to note
that the Cafundó preterit forms cuendou 'sent' and cuipou 'killed' have the
Portuguese inflection (-ou) for verbs with infinitives ending in -ar, by far the
largest verb class in the language, indicating that in all probability this verb
class was the model for Cafundó verbs, as would be expected. Another
interesting fact is that the Cafundó word for 'God', Turupã, in all likelihood is
of Tupi origin (cf. Tupi Tupã 'God') indicating that Amerindian languages
might also have played a role in the language contact scenario in the Cafundó
area.

As can be seen from the above, Cafundó seems to be a code for secret
communication, still maintained by the Afro-Brazilian population of the
village. Its inception period is unknown; however, its lexicon seems to be
 33

mainly of Bantu origin and its grammar closely corresponds to that of BVP.

1.2.2 The language of the Negro da Costa

The language of the Negro da Costa is spoken by the Afro-Brazilian

population of an isolated rural community on the outskirts of the township of
Bom Despacho in the state of Minas Gerais. Its use, like that of Cafundó,
expresses solidarity among the local Afro-Brazilians, preserving the secrecy
of their intra-group conversations.

Queiroz (1984) is a master's thesis that discusses the origins, grammar and
vocabulary of this language, as well as the conditions of its speakers' lives
and the reasons the language is still used.

The Negro da Costa language resulted from the need for secret intra-group
communication, and it is apparently made up of mostly Bantu lexicon and
BVP grammar, much like the Cafundó speech.

Queiroz provides a lengthy vocabulary list for the language, showing a

frequent process of word formation, through which a specific meaning is
achieved through the combination of several lexical items, as for example
the following (ibid.:168):
 34

(38) cuete de curimba

BVP homem de trabalho
man of work
'worker'
(cf. Kimbundu ukueto 'man') 8

As can be seen below, the language of the Negro da Costa is a mixture of

African and Portuguese lexicon, with BVP grammar (ibid.:146):

(39) É, até a ingura dele onte ficô meio mema reduzida, porque ficô
É, até o dinheiro dele onte ficô meio memo reduzido, porque ficô

muita cuete sem caxá ingura.

muita mulhé sem recebê dinhero

'Yeah, he (the boss) was even short of money yesterday, because

many women didn't get paid'

(cf. Kimbundu ungura 'money', ocueto 'man', cachia 'to arrive, to be')

(40) É, por isso que eu tô veno esses moná, cuete, cafuvira, ocora,

8The etyma provided on this section are from Queiroz (1984).

 35

É, por isso que eu tô veno esses menino, home, preto, velho,

ocaia cassucara é...percisano fazê cureio, num tem jeito de curiá,

mulhé casada é percisano fazê comida, num tem jeito de comê,

porque num caxa ingura

porque num tem dinheiro

'Yeah, this is why I keep seeing these children, men, blacks, elderly
people, married women, eh...in need to cook some food, there isn't a
way to eat, because there isn't any money'

(cf. Kimbundu mona 'criança', ukueto 'man', ococa 'elder', u-kay

'woman', kudia 'to eat', Ambundu kuria 'to eat' [Guasque 1992:100] )

As shown in (39) and (40), there is literally no difference between the

structure of the language of the Negro da Costa and BVP, but the
unintelligibility of the former to speakers of the latter is guaranteed by the
frequency of nouns and adjectives of African origin.

1.2.3 Lanc-Patuá
 36

Andrade (1984) is an anthropological study of a creole community in the

state of Amapá in northern Brazil which also analyzes some features of the
French-based creole used in intra-group communication.

The creole population of Amapá arrived in Brazil about sixty years ago, in
search for better life conditions than those found in their native countries.
That population is by no means of a single ethnic origin; in addition to the
immigrants from the French Guiana, there were others from Guyana,
Barbados, Suriname, Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Lucia. The common
characteristic among all these immigrants was that all of them spoke a creole
natively, although not the same one. Andrade suggests that Lanc-Patuá was
originally brought to Brazil from Cayenne in French Guiana and since then
has borrowed some Portuguese and English lexical items.

Andrade lists some features of Lanc-Patuá which are very typical of creole
languages, such as:

1- lack of morphological gender inflexion; gender is marked through

the postposition of nom (male) and fam (female) to nouns, as in polis
nom (literally police male)'policeman' and polis fam (literally police
female) 'police woman'; 9

9 Nom and fam in the examples provided may well be grammaticalized versions of the same
lexical items, therefore, being bound morphemes.
 37

2- absence of NP number marking, plurality is inferred from context,

as in bocu caminhon 'many trucks';
3- invariable subject and object pronouns and possessive adjectives, as in
u 'you, your';
4- a preverbal tense-mood-aspect particle system, with the forms ka as
the habitual marker, kai as the irrealis marker, and ti as the anterior
marker.

Andrade (1984:85) also provides a short comparative list of features shared

by Lanc-Patuá and BVP (Caipira dialect), which is summarized below:

1- a single verb form for all grammatical persons (although this is an

overgeneralization for BVP, since there are usually two verbal
forms, cf. chapter four), as in:
Lanc-Patuá French BVP SBP
nun c nous sommes nóis é nós somos
'we are'
 38

2- Postposition of certain determiners (possessive adjectives) to the

nucleus of the NP, as in: 10
Lanc-Patuá French BVP SBP
pahuen muen mon parrain padr˜i meu 11 meu padrinho
'my godfather'

3- Reanalysis of morpheme boundaries (determiner + noun), as in:

Lanc-Patuá French BVP SBP
zelév/zélev les élèves zóyo os olhos
'the students' 'the eyes'

1.3 Parallels between BVP and vernacular Spanish in the

Caribbean

The kind of debate surrounding the origins of the vernacular varieties of

Portuguese in Brazil can also be found in certain areas of Spanish America,
where there are vernacular varieties of Spanish whose origins are also a
matter of some debate. Interestingly, these areas, like Brazil, were the
destination of a large number of African slaves brought over during the
colonial era to work mostly on plantations.

10All examples of noun-determiner inversion found in my corpus are of the kind examplified
above, i.e., the determiner is a possessive adjective following a noun.

11 This form is commonly found in the Caipira dialect.

 39

Indeed, there are several non-Iberian grammatical features which are

common to both BVP and the vernaculars of coastal Colombia, Venezuela
and Ecuador, as well as the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama and
Cuba. The hypotheses offered to account for the origins of many non-
standard features in the areas mentioned above are twofold: on one side are
those scholars who believe in language-internal changes and the preservation
of archaic and regional dialectal features of Iberian Portuguese (cf. chapter
two) or Spanish (e.g. Morales 1970); on the other, are scholars who argue for
language contact induced changes, especially contact between the Iberian
languages brought to the Americas and the African languages brought by
slaves, and also, possibly, via a pidgin or creole varieties of Portuguese
spoken on the coast of Africa during colonial times (e.g. Otheguy 1973,
Nazario 1974, Granda 1978, Megenney 1982, 1988 and 1990, Perl 1982 and
1991, Lipski 1987 and 1994, Alvarez 1990, and Holm and Lorenzino 1992).

Granda (1978) offers a comprehensive study of these Hispanic-American

vernaculars with a clear position in favor of the language contact hypothesis.
As a matter of fact, Granda goes so far as postulating that in all these areas
there was widespread creolization in colonial times, concluding that today's
vernaculars are the result of rapid decreolization after the abolition of
slavery.

Granda (1978:383) argues that in some areas in Hispanic America, there is

 40

either a creole, as is the case in El Palenque de San Basilio in the Cartagena

region (cf. Friedman and Patiño 1983 and Schwegler 1996), or creole
remnants, such as the vernaculars in Uré and El Chocó in Colombia, in ex-
maroon areas in Panama and Ecuador, and the so-called Habla Bozal or
Spanish of African-born slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Among the creole features identified in Cuban Habla Bozal by Granda

(1978:485) and also present in certain BVP dialects (e.g. Helvécia dialect, cf.
section 1.1.1) and the Hispanic-American vernaculars, the following are
significant: 12

1- absence of NP gender agreement: cabeza malo (cf. SP cabeza mala)

'bad head';

2- absence of definite articles: mete ø tierra (cf. SP mete la tierra)

'put the soil';

3- a single form for both subject and object pronouns: dá yo (cf. SP dá

me) 'give me';

4- overt subject pronouns (due to lack of person/number verbal

12 Granda's data are from Cabrera (1954).

 41

inflexions): tú saca remedio (cf. SP sacas el remedio) 'you take the

medicine';

5- lack of passive and reflexive constructions: en Dajómi ñama Jebioso

(cf. SP se llama Changó Jebioso en Dahomey).

Another feature that is argued to have originated in creole languages is

double verbal negation and single post-verbal negation, current in BVP,
Dominican, Ecuadorian, Panamanian and Colombian vernacular Spanish and
the Palenquero creole of Colombia (cf. Schwegler 1991b and forthcoming,
and Granda 1978:515), as in no sé esto nu (cf. SP no sé esto), BVP num sei
isso não (cf. P não sei isso)'I don't know this'.

McWhorter (1995) takes issue with both Otheguy (1973) and Granda (1978)
and suggests that the so-called creole features in Cuban Bozal Spanish, in
reality, are marks of a second-language register. McWhorter (1995:220),
however, says that there was indeed restructuring in Bozal Spanish, and
given the "thorny" nature of the arguments that classify a given language as
being a creole, "some authors will quite legitimately find it useful for their
purposes to designate Bozal as a creole" (idem). Despite not providing a
clear definition for what a creole is, McWhorter (1995) affirms that what
distinguishes Bozal from other languages he labels creoles (e.g., Sranan and
Haitian) is the lack of "significant transfer from West African languages on
the morphosyntactic level" (ibid.:217). He then goes on to provide a list of
 42

what these features would be, namely serial verb constructions, isomorphy of
comitative preposition and coordinate conjunction, unmarked verbs used in
past contexts, absence of morphology and multifunctional pronouns.

The social and historical parallels between the colonization of Brazil and
Spanish America raise the question of possible common origins for these
non-standard features in the vernacular speech in both areas. The
grammatical features common to BVP and the Spanish vernaculars are likely
to have resulted from more than mere coincidence. 13

1.4 Summary

This dissertation about the genesis and development of BVP began with a
discussion of BVP dialects whose structure sets them apart from standard
Brazilian and European Portuguese.

It was also suggested that certain vernacular varieties of American Spanish

may have much in common with BVP through similarities in their genesis.

In the next chapters we will first review the pertinent literature on BVP,

13The marking of plurality in the most leftward element of NP's, which is typical of BVP, is also a
common feature of the Spanish vernaculars.
 43

discuss its socio-historical background, analyze its distinguishing features

and, finally, reevaluate the processes which produced this language variety.

As will become clear in the next chapters, BVP has many non-Iberian
grammatical features that set it apart from both vernacular European
Portuguese and standard Portuguese in general. The quest for the origins of
these features will be our main goal in the remainder of this dissertation. In
order to pursue this, I will draw from the available linguistic, demographic
and sociohistoric accounts of colonial Brazil, as well as from linguistic
research in the fields of language change, language acquisition and learning,
language shift, borrowing and bilingual processing.

My approach is holistic given the fact that I consider all factors that are likely
to have played a part in the genesis of BVP. Therefore, I do not depart from
a preconceived hypothesis about the theme in study here and search for
supporting evidence for that only, but rather analyze the evidence that is
available and try to match it with possible scenarios that may have led to the
formation of BVP. I will first explore the social history of BVP speakers (cf.
chapter three) and the distinguishing grammatical features of BVP (cf.
chapter four), and only then, in chapter five, will I propose an account for this
language's genesis taking into consideration the sociohistoric and linguistic
evidence found in my research.
 44

CHAPTER 2

OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

2.0 General remarks

The study of the genesis of BVP as a worthwhile enterprise came to the

attention of modern linguists enlightened by promising new linguistic
theories. This does not mean that no mention was made or that no interest
ever existed regarding this language variety previously. Quite on the
contrary, as we shall see, since the nineteenth century different authors, for
very different reasons, have had BVP on their agenda. For some, this
language variety represented the corruption and disgrace of an old and rich
language, European Portuguese. To others, BVP represented the result of the
linguistic creativity and richness brought about by the contact between
different languages and cultures. And to others yet, focusing on language
 45

change from the perspective of the internal development of a language, BVP

could be seen as a direct drift from vernacular and dialectal varieties of EP,
following tendencies for changes shared by other Romance languages (e.g.
French).

From the beginnings of the nineteenth century there was already discussion
whether enough evidence for positing an autonomous Brazilian language
could be established. This debate arose after Brazil's independence from
Portugal in 1822. Until then, however, most educated people, as well as
writers, assumed that the vernaculars of both Brazil and Portugal presented
some dissimilarities but that their standard forms were the same.

At that time, those who believed in an authentic Brazilian language based

their arguments mostly on syntactic and morphological phenomena such as
pronominal collocation and case marking, reduction of verbal inflections,
prepositional usage and governing particles that link verbs to their arguments
(cf. Elia 1993:144 and references cited there). All these features already
distinguished the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, even by educated people in
informal situations, from corresponding varieties spoken in Portugal.

2.1 From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century

 46

The first Portuguese linguist who worked extensively with creole languages
was Adolpho Coelho. In Coelho (1880-1886) he listed several features
observed in different creoles around the world, especially the Portuguese-
based creoles of Africa and Asia, attributing them to universal tendencies in
those languages. In his studies of BVP, Coelho concluded that 'it shows a
tendency towards creolization' (ibid. 1967:170), given some of the features
which he observed in the language.

Coelho (idem) stated that the reasons that the Brazilian dialect differed so
extensively from the language of Portugal, was its contact with indigenous
and African languages and the effect left on it by both the Indians and the
Africans in their attempts to speak it. Coelho noted that it was very
unfortunate that the Brazilian dialect had been the object of mockery instead
of being scientifically studied by Brazilian writers. He also noted the
inaccuracy with which Brazilian writers reproduced popular songs,
transcribing them into the standard language, such as the stanza below
(ibid.:162), which he collected while in Brazil and later saw published by a
Brazilian in its standard form:

BVP SBP English

 47

Dizem que a muyé Dizem que a mulher Some say the woman
é farsa é falsa is false
Tão farsa como papé Tão falsa como papel As false as paper
Mas quem vendeu Mas quem vendeu But who sold
Jesus Cristo Jesus Cristo Jesus Christ
Foi homem Foi homem was a man
não foi muyé não foi mulher not a woman

In the stanza above, /l/ is substituted by /r/ in two words and the palatal
lateral /¥/ is depalatalized and replaced by /y/.

Among the features Coelho noticed in BVP as divergent from European

Portuguese are the following: the tendency for syllable structure
simplification into the consonant-vowel pattern, simplified verb forms, lack
of both NP and subject-verb number agreement, the use of subject pronouns
for object pronouns, the use of the verb ter 'to have' with existencial meaning
instead of haver 'there is/are'.

Vasconcellos (1883, 1901), another Portuguese scholar, also studied different

Portuguese dialects around the world. In his section on BVP (ibid. 134) he
stated that 'Brazil, because of its territorial extension and the variety of races
that populate it, offers us several dialectal differences'.
 48

Schuchardt (1883) was a German scholar who also called for the study of
BVP, given its 'creole-like' features.

The first half of the twentieth century in Brazil saw an increase in intellectual
production, including linguistic studies. Several authors described the legacy
that the contact of African and indigenous Brazilian languages with
Portuguese had left in BP. Most of these works focused on lexical
borrowings and phonological interference; there was little discussion of the
innovative morphosyntactic features of BVP. Another characteristic of those
works was their focus on regional dialects in Brazil. These sources make
clear the remarkable morphosyntactic and phonological similarities among
the regional varieties of BVP despite their large number of differences.

Among the authors who studied non-Portuguese elements in BVP are

Mendonça (1935 and 1936), Raimundo (1933 and 1941), Ribeiro (1933) and
Senna (1938), who all focused on African influences. Ayrosa (1937) and
Sampaio (1928) investigated the indigenous Tupi language family as an
important source of BVP lexicon.

Dialectal studies within BVP included the northeastern speech of Alagoas

and Pernambuco (Marroquim 1934). Amaral (1920) studied the Caipira
dialect of the interior of São Paulo state in great detail, while Nascentes
(1922) focused on the Carioca speech of Rio de Janeiro. Teixeira (1938)
wrote about the Mineiro speech and later (1944) about the speech variety
 49

from the state of Goiás. Also following the same regionalist vein, the papers
published in the Anais do Primeiro Congresso de Língua Nacional Cantada
(1938) dealt with the characterization of the speech varieties from the states
of Ceará, Pará, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul.

2.2 Mid-twentieth century studies

Around 1935 a series of grammars were written about BP, for the first time
using examples from Brazilian literature instead of the traditional EP ones.
These authors usually mentioned in passing the broad difference between the
standard and the vernacular languages of Brazil. Most of these writers
acknowledged that in Brazil the vernacular was largely spoken by
uneducated people in rural areas. Some authors postulated the temporary
existence of creoles spoken by indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples in the
country before their full convergence with Portuguese. Whenever possible,
however, they cautioned against exaggeration, suggesting EP dialectal
origins for some of the divergences between BVP and the standard language
both in Portugal and Brazil. Among these authors are Monteiro (1931), Pinto
(1931), Juca (1937), Neiva (1940), Sanches (1940), Boléo (1943), Rossi
(1945), Melo (1946 [1981]), and Silva Neto (1950 [1963]).

Many authors also contributed to the debate as to whether Brazilian

Portuguese is a dialectal variation of European Portuguese or in fact a distinct
 50

language. Most of these writings, however, conformed to the point of view

that BP is an extension of dialectal varieties of European Portuguese. Among
the various works in this area the following are the most representative:
Cunha (1968), Elia (1940), Leda (1940), Leite (1922), Lemos (1916),
Machado (w/d), Mendonça (1936), Nascentes (1933) and (1938), Neiva
(1940), Raimundo (1941), Sanches (1940), Sérgio (1937), Sousa (1960), and
Viana Filho (1954). 14

2.3 The 1960's and 1970's

From the 1960's onwards, a series of new works, focusing either on the
lexicon or the structure of BVP were published. Bueno (1963) suggested that
the Tupi influence in BVP was more significant than that of African
languages. Révah (1963) argued that the trend toward morphological
simplification in BVP was directly inherited from a general tendency in Indo-
European languages.

Rossi (1963) published a collection of studies about different varieties of

BVP found in Bahia and their heavy borrowing of African words. Following
Rossi's works, Castro (1967, 1976) and Castro and Castro (1980) investigated
the influence of African languages and traditions on Bahian culture. This

14 Cf. also Houaiss (1985) for more references and discussion.

 51

same line of research was followed by Megenney (1970, 1978), who also
focused on the etymological study of African borrowings in Bahian BVP. He
later (1989, 1991) expanded his findings to include religious and ritual chants
in Bahia.

In the light of modern linguistic theories, especially generative grammar and

the Labovian variationist approach, the study of dialectal as well as urban and
rural varieties of BP in Brazil entered a new period in the 1970's. Many of
these studies deal with the language varieties labeled BVP in this
dissertation.

A generative grammar of the Caipira dialect of São Paulo was written by

Rodrigues (1974). 15 This author comments that she had not expected to find
Caipira speech so alive and well fifty years after its first description by
Amaral (1920). However, she notes that the Caipira dialect seems not to
have lost its geographical area of influence. Rodrigues found this fact to be
remarkable because despite the poverty of most of its speakers in the state of
São Paulo, the influence of television had already reached even the most
remote areas of Brazil. She assumed that the influence of television would
have pushed the speech patterns of Caipira dialect speakers towards a more
standard-like lect. However, television may generate passive knowledge of

15 The Caipira dialect is spoken in most rural areas of Brazil and not only in the state of São Paulo, despite
its diverse regional flavors.
 52

SBV in BVP speakers, but not necessarily active knowledge.

Jeroslow (1974, later McKinney) studied the speech of a rural community in

Ceará and found features that led her to hypothesize the prior creolization of
that dialect. Among those features the most outstanding was verb
serialization (cf. chapter four ).

Following the Labovian research paradigm, many studies were written at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, mainly under the guidance of Anthony
Naro. Starting from the mid-seventies, and analyzing the non-standard
Carioca speech of Rio de Janeiro, Naro and Lemle (1976), like Révah (1963)
had done previously, proposed that BVP was undergoing changes motivated
internally by general tendencies of Indo-European languages, a rather general
statement put forth without sound evidence to support it. They argued that
these features were already present in the sixteenth-century dialects spoken
by Portuguese settlers and, in their view, there had been no creole influence
on BVP. This same point was argued for in Carvalho (1977), based on social
history

Naro and Lemle (1976) and Naro (1981) proposed that the saliency principle
was the basic universal constraint guiding syntactic change in BVP variation
in number agreement. In their view, the language is undergoing the loss of
agreement markers both in the NP and VP. Therefore, morphological
marking of agreement is manifested most often in irregular verbal paradigms;
 53

such is the case in irregular and idiosyncratic verb stems which tend to
preserve agreement markers, as in BVP nóis somu which is similar to the
SBP form nós somos "we are", as opposed to the more salient and less
common BVP form nóis é "we are". 16 On the other hand, regular paradigms,
which present the same verb stem in all its forms seem to favor the omission
of agreement markers, as is the case in BVP nóis qué (cf. SBP nós queremos
"we want").

2.4 Work on BVP in Brazil: 1980's

Several of Naro's students have given insightful contributions to the analysis

of important aspects of BVP. Among them, Braga's (1977) and Scherre's
(1978) master's theses started a line of research on number agreement in BVP
that both authors have pursued and expanded over the years. Focusing yet on
possible motivations for changes in BVP, Votre (1978) studied phonological
variation in Carioca speech.

Other variationist studies focusing on BVP are Braga and Scherre (1976) on
16 The complete paradigm for the standard simple present indicative of verb ser "to be" is:

1s eu sou I am
2s tu és, você é you are
3s ele, ela é he, she is
1p nós somos we are
2p vós sóis, vocês são you are
3p eles, elas são they are
 54

Carioca speech, Ponte (1979) on the dialect of Alegre (in the state of Rio
Grande do Sul), Nina (1980) on the Bragantina speech variety (in the state of
Pará) and Dias on the urban and rural speech in Brasília (Federal District).

Veado (1982) described a rural speech variety of northern Minas Gerais,

focusing on syntax, with special emphasis on NP number agreement. She
concluded that certain features of standard Portuguese are not part of the
competence of rural dialect speakers (e.g. the quasi-passive construction). As
she pointed out, this fact has important implications for both the
communication between speakers of standard BP and BVP and for literacy
programs that attempt to teach the standard variety of the language to non-
standard speakers.

Tarallo (1984) explored relativization strategies in the informal speech of

mostly urban middle class speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, demonstrating
that these are different from the ones found in the standard system. To
convey relativization, BVP speakers resort to either a resumptive pronoun
strategy (e.g., [A casa]i quei eu moro nelai "The house that I live in it") or to
a PP-chopping strategy (e.g., A casa que eu moro ø "The house I live [in]")
(cf. chapter four), as opposed to the standard piedpiping strategy (e.g., A casa
em que moro "The house in which I live"). Tarallo's research took into
account a broad range of data, and as a result he was able to show that the
resumptive pronoun strategy was more pervasive in lower class speech, while
the deletion of the preposition is widely found even in middle and upper class
 55

speech. The theoretical framework adopted by Tarallo was a compromise

between the government and binding version of generative syntax and the
variationist model.

2.5 Work on BVP in Brazil: 1990's

Several syntax studies have been produced in the last ten years at the
University of Campinas, mainly by the research group associated with
Tarallo. Their approach is both variationist and diachronic (cf. Tarallo 1986
and 1992, and Tarallo and Kato 1989). Representative articles on syntax
within the principles and parameters framework are Galves (1987, 1989,
1991, 1993).

The association of formal analysis and diachronic description has been

advanced by Kato (1987, 1993b), in whose view the bases for the
contemporary shape of BVP were already present in the vernacular dialects
of sixteenth-century European Portuguese.

In Roberts and Kato (1993), BVP is described as a separate language from

European Portuguese on the basis of a principles and parameters analysis.
According to the authors, a change of parameters occurred in BVP, making
this language diverge irreversibly from EP. This idea was first suggested by
Tarallo (1986, translated and reprinted in Roberts and Kato 1993), who
 56

argued for what he called 'untargeted syntactic changes' in Brazilian

Portuguese. In that paper Tarallo criticizes what he calls 'the alleged creole
origin' of BVP on the basis of the lack of evidence of and the unlikelihood of
the occurrence of abrupt decreolization, which in his opinion would have had
to take place for the language to develop into its present form after
undergoing creolization.

It is worth noting, however, that Tarallo's interpretation of creolization was

rather limited, because he only considered the possibility of the existence of
one uniform creole language for the entire Brazilian territory in colonial
times. This is also the mistaken view put forth in Naro and Scherre (1993).
These authors, however, failed to understand the dynamic and variable nature
of language contact phenomena (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988), through
which full creolization is not required in order for language restructuring to
take place. Therefore, both Tarallo (1986) and Naro and Scherre (1993)
discredited the previous creolization hypothesis in part because of mistaken
theoretical assumptions.

Naro and Scherre's (1993) major claim is that at the time the Portuguese
language was brought to Brazil it carried along "a centuries-old drift", which
interacted with other factors giving rise to BVP. In their view, therefore, the
ultimate source of the changes that occurred in the Portuguese language in
Brazil can be traced back to Portugal; however, the authors failed to explain
why at least some of these alleged tendencies present in archaic Portuguese
 57

did not develop also in European Portuguese, rather than occurring only in
Brazilian Portuguese.

The articles in Roberts and Kato (1993), including Tarallo (1993), point out
the linguistic bases for the study of an authentic Brazilian grammar, as
opposed to a broad Portuguese grammar, which in most instances implies
European Portuguese. Among the most important aspects of the Brazilian
grammar system, the following are given special attention:

(a) reorganization of the pronominal system, that is, the use of

subject pronouns in object function, for example eu vi ela [cf.
SBP eu a vi], and consequently, the suppression of clitic pronouns (cf.
Cerqueira 1993, Cyrino 1993, Duarte 1993, Nunes 1993, Pagotto
1993);

(b) syntactic changes in relativization strategies, that is, the adoption of

PP-chopping, as for example in a casa que eu moro ø [cf. SBP a
casa em que moro] 'the house I live in', and resumptive pronoun
strategy, as in o menino que eu vi ele [cf. SBP o menino que vi ]
'the boy that I saw'(cf. Kato 1993a);

(c) reorganization of basic sentence patterns, including rigid SVO order

and the rigidity of adjacency principles in the assignment of
accusative case; the freedom of verb movement observed in
 58

EP does not exist in BP, so the overwhelming majority of

sentences have the verb in the second position of the clause;
furthermore, clitic collocation in BP also differs widely from that of
EP (cf. Morais 1993);

(d) sentential patterns of direct and indirect questions, that is, the lack of
verb-subject inversion in interrogative clauses, as in você viu a
bola? [cf. SBP viu você a bola?] 'did you see the ball?'(cf. Rossi
1993). 17

All the papers in Roberts and Kato (1993) are based on diachronic data from
plays and novels, and synchronic data from middle-class speakers or from the
authors' intuitions. This observation is especially relevant because it shows
that the language varieties analyzed were not exactly what we are calling
BVP in this dissertation, that is, the speech of rural and lower class urban
people, despite the authors' claims to be analysing the origins of BVP which
is and has always been a spoken language from its beginnings. The
conclusion arrived at by the contributors in Roberts and Kato (1993) that BP
has shifted syntactic parameters only in the last hundred years, therefore
distancing itself from EP is only applicable to written samples of informal
BP. These studies do not contribute to the understanding of the origins of
BVP as a spoken language since the authors did not analyze any diachronic

17 Cf also Berlinck (1988) and (1989).

 59

language samples that are illustrative of this topic to support their

conclusions about the origins of BVP.

2.6 Africanist and creolist approaches to BVP

The similarities between certain aspects of the lexicon, phonology and syntax
of BVP and African languages were the focus of some early authors such as
Mendonça (1936), Reinecke (1937) and Raimundo (1941). It is interesting
to note that, despite their invaluable contribution to the study of BVP, some
of these works, for example Mendonça (1936), are permeated by heavily
ideological tones by their authors, who attributed all divergent features in the
language to African language influence. Many of their lexical analyses,
trying to prove the African origins of BVP words, have also been disputed
more recently (cf. Megenney forthcoming).

Other authors have explored the remnants of African languages still alive in
Brazil or spoken until very recently. Machado (1943), although referring in
his book to the 'creole dialect of São João da Chapada' in the mining region
of Diamantina, Minas Gerais, in fact described aspects of an African lingua
franca formerly employed by slaves in the mines during the eighteenth
century.

Peixoto (1945), based on original material collected in 1731, published an

 60

account of the Lingoa Minna (sic.), a lingua franca spoken by newly arrived
boçal slaves in the mining areas of Minas Gerais (cf. Holm 1987:415, who
reports that this language has been identified as Fon).

More recent endeavors in this same field have been the series of articles
published by Fry, Gnerre and Vogt in the 80's, who identified communities in
the state of São Paulo (eg. the Cafundó community) in which remnants of
Bantu languages are supposedly still spoken (cf. section 1.2.2).

Queiroz (1984) studied the Língua do Negro da Costa in the region of Bom
Despacho, Minas Gerais. This language which is still spoken, seems to be a
code for secret communication among the local black population, mainly
used today as a sign of group solidarity. According to Queiroz (idem) this
language was probably first employed as a means of keeping secret from the
whites the slaves' plans and strategies to survive, such as where to get some
extra food, or who was planning to escape, and the like. Its syntactic
structure is allegedly similar to that of rural BVP, but its lexicon, especially
major classes of words such as nouns and verbs, seems to be Bantu derived.
Couto (1993) has argued that this language fits the category of languages that
he labeled as anti-creoles, that is, languages which represent a relexified
stage of another language (cf. Anglo-Romani, which is mostly English
grammar with Romani lexicon). Couto's aim was to distinguish simple
relexification from the much more complex process of creolization, which
has typically been described as involving restructuring in all grammatical as
 61

well as lexico-semantic levels of a given language due to contact with several

other languages, and irregular language transmission.

As mentioned in 2.1 above, observations concerning the structural and

phonological similarities between BVP varieties and the Portuguese-based
creoles were published very early on by Coelho (1880-1886) and
Vasconcellos (1901). Throughout the twentieth century some authors have
hinted at the possible existence of creole languages in colonial Brazil and
their assimilation into Brazilian Portuguese. Silva Neto (1963), for example,
in several passages refers to a possible 'creole or semi-creole' as resulting
from 'adaptations suffered by Portuguese in its use by mixed, indigenous and
African peoples'. Silva Neto (ibid.:51) proceeds to say that this language
'was characterized by an extreme simplification of forms, and maybe, in the
beginning, by some linguistic features attributable to the interference of other
languages'. However, Silva Neto avoids the debate as to whether or not
modern BVP has features inherited from contact with African and indigenous
languages; he seems to think that these language varieties spoken by illiterate
people have disappeared with what he called the triumph of Portuguese over
other languages in Brazil.

Melo (1981) also refers to the existence of creole languages in Brazil's

colonial times and asserts that they left some marks on present-day Brazilian
Portuguese; however, he warned against exaggerating this influence since he
believed that many of the supposedly creole-derived aspects in BP are in fact
 62

from archaic Portuguese. Melo (ibid.:76-78) states that in all likelihood there
were at least three Portuguese-based creoles spoken in Brazil, these being
Yoruba, Bantu and Tupi influenced creoles respectively, which ultimately
died out through decreolization.

With the further development of linguistic theory in the second half of this
century, more recent studies have focused on the possible scenarios for
language contact in the development of BVP, written in the light of modern
frameworks of analysis. One such example is Guy (1981) in which the
variationist approach is employed in the analysis of the Carioca vernacular
Portuguese spoken in Rio de Janeiro. In his dissertation, Guy explored
several aspects of BVP, correlating agreement rules and other linguistic
variables. He showed that in both NP and subject-verb agreement, paradigms
are shaped by phonological and morphosyntactic rules which set BVP apart
from standard Brazilian Portuguese. Guy also discussed the origins of what
he called 'the popular dialect'; concluding that BVP is in all probability a
decreolized version of an earlier Portuguese-based creole language spoken in
Brazil. Despite the very insightful discussions in Guy's work, evidence for
his claim of previous creolization is lacking. He did not present any data that
confirms his theoretical assumption, which certainly weakens his thesis and
provides the opportunity for scholars opposed to the creolization hypothesis
to generalize - mistakenly - the view that no language contact phenomena
occurred in colonial Brazil (cf. Tarallo 1986).
 63

Interestingly, although Guy (1981) used the Competências Básicas Project as

his data source, the conclusions he arrived at were opposite to those of Lemle
and Naro (1977) 18 . In Guy's view, BVP morphosyntax is moving towards
that of standard BP due to the exposure of speakers to television and the
progressive lowering of the level of illiteracy in Brazil. Lemle and Naro
(1977), on the other hand, concluded that agreement rules are being
simplified even in standard BP, since the tendency is for this language to
have number marking only on the first element of the NP and to have overt
subject pronouns compensate for lack of inflexions in the verbal paradigm.

Holm (1987) also argued for the hypothesis of previous creolization of BVP.
In his article, Holm reasons that the similarities found between the
phonology, lexico-semantics and morphosyntax of BVP and the Portuguese-
based creole languages are not merely coincidental. His thesis is based on
sociohistorical data that point towards the similarities between the
demographics of colonial Brazil and other New World colonies in which
creole languages became established (e.g. Jamaica, Haiti, and El Palenque de
San Basílio in Colombia). In all these areas, throughout colonial times, there
was a constant influx of African slaves who were mainly sent to work on
sugar plantations and in other agricultural activities in isolated rural areas.

18The Competências Básicas Project consisted of a database collected to study the speech of illiterate
Brazilians. This project, initiated in 1975, was directed by Miriam Lemle and Anthony Naro of the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
 64

Holm (1991) proposes yet another hypothesis to explain what he sees as

creole features in BVP: that BVP may be included in the group of languages
classified as semi-creoles. In Holm's view, instead of undergoing full
creolization, these languages had contact with other creoles and through
borrowing acquired creole features. Another possibility for semi-creolization
to take place would be what Holm (1991) calls partial restructuring, that is,
only certain aspects of the grammar of a language underwent restructuring as
opposed to the complete reorganization of the grammar in full creoles.

Schwegler (1991) discusses negation patterns in Brazilian Portuguese. The

author concluded that double verbal negation as in num vou não (cf. SBP
não vou) 'I'm not going', and post-verbal negation as in vou não 'I'm not
going' probably are the result of Portuguese internal changes, resulting from a
cyclic changing process observed in other Indo-European languages.
However, in a post-script Schwegler states that since he wrote this paper in
1983, fieldwork he carried out in other Latin American countries, such as
Colombia and the Dominican Republic, has changed his views about
negation processes in BVP. He now firmly believes that the negation
patterns mentioned above were already present in the speech of slaves taken
to Brazil as early as the sixteenth century, and that they are ultimately of
African and/or creole origin (cf. also Schwegler forthcoming).

The largest research project exploring possible creole vestiges in Brazil is

being undertaken by Alan Baxter of La Trobe University, Australia, and his
 65

collaborators in Brazil. After a preliminary study in Helvécia (in the state of

Bahia) in 1987-88, Baxter concluded that the dialect spoken in that Afro-
Brazilian community indeed presents several grammatical features that
suggest the irregular language transmission which characterizes creole
languages.

Baxter and his research team have expanded the initial project to include
several isolated Afro-Brazilian communities in the northeast and southeast of
Brazil. Although this research project is still in progress, some of the
resulting publications are already available, such as Baxter (1992, 1993 and
forthcoming) and Baxter and Lucchesi (1993).

2.7 Summary

This chapter discusses and summarizes the main scholarly works on BVP in
the light of the time of their publication and their theoretical approach. It was
noted that the study of BVP has been of interest to both Brazilian and foreign
scholars since the nineteenth century. The first publications on the subject
were highly colored by their authors' ideological beliefs. However, in the last
half of this century, discussion of the subject has been more firmly based on
current linguistic theory. Although there is no consensus on the
developmental processes that shaped BVP, research in the area has become
more rigorous, producing important findings that linguistic theories must
 66

account for.

Nevertheless, the ideological beliefs of researchers still seem to interfere at

times with the difficult process of reaching conclusions about the origins of
BVP. I firmly believe that a more thorough study of the sociohistorical
conditions in colonial Brazil, along with linguistic research on archaic
Portuguese dialects and contemporary European and Brazilian Portuguese
dialects, is an important source of more accurate conclusions about this
subject.

CHAPTER 3
 67

SOCIOHISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF BVP

3.0 General remarks

Is it possible to assess the diachronic changes undergone by a given language

on a purely linguistic basis? The answer to this question depends largely on
the amount of samples of the language through time accessible to the
researcher. In the specific case of BVP, unfortunately, there are few samples
because most of the linguistic records to be found about Brazilian Portuguese
are written in the standard form of the language.

The popular oral tradition, including religious chants, folk tales and popular
plays, may be more helpful to the study of non-standard languages, since all
of these are passed from generation to generation, through repetition and
memorization. They are part of a people's cultural heritage and identity,
transmitting ancient knowledge and traditions to each new generation. But
even a people's oral literature changes over times. Innovations are included,
the phonology evolves, and even grammatical structures may be reanalysed.

For BVP, a largely oral language, the situation is no different. The modern
 68

researcher has to search carefully for each linguistic detail that might lead to
discoveries about the variety's genesis, such as phonological and
morphosyntactic features not present in EP, or even more subtle clues, such
as features expected to be in the language but that in reality are absent. In
this task, it is likely that comparative work, which takes into account the
superstrate and substrate languages, as well as linguistic varieties that are
known to have developed in similar socio-historical conditions as BVP may
prove to be very instrumental in helping us understand the processes that
ultimately led to the formation of this language variety. In this difficult task,
one needs to take into consideration the social history of the people who
speak the language, since sociohistorical data have become an important tool
in the study of the development of modern language varieties.

In this chapter, the social history of BVP is assessed as a means of shedding

some light on the various grammatical changes the language has undergone
in its five-hundred year history. It will be shown that, from the early
colonization period, European Portuguese speakers (whites) were a minority
in the country. On the other hand, the slave population, initially indigenous
and later of African origin, along with the mixed population that increased
along the years, were always the majority group. Taking into consideration
the socio-economic conditions of the majority of the population in colonial
Brazil, it will be proposed that although a complete breakage in the
transmission of Portuguese to most of the enslaved population never
occurred, language shift for this population group prompted the maintenance
 69

of interlanguage features, due to the lack of adequate exposure to the target

language (Portuguese). This, however, in no way precludes the possibility of
there having existed contact registers such as pidgins, or even temporary
creoles in certain areas of the country, namely sugar cane plantations and
isolated rural areas in which the proportion of colored people to whites was
overwhelming.

3.1 Population patterns in early colonial Brazil

When the Portuguese first reached the Brazilian coast in 1500, they found
the land occupied by indigenous peoples living in small groups who
survived by hunting, fishing, and gathering (cf. Calmon 1933). Although
the Portuguese tried to settle the coast of Brazil from the beginning of the
colonization era, they had neither enough ships nor people to occupy the
land. Therefore, the first colonizers were mainly concerned with opening
stations along the coast for the extraction of the much prized brazil-wood.
This initial commercial activity was followed by the sugar cane era and
colonization proper. At first, the plantations were worked by Indian slaves,
but this group very soon proved to be unsuitable for a sedentary life. The
need for a large number of people who could both work strenuously and
adapt to the tropical climate prompted the importation of African slaves to
Brazil.
 70

The cultivation of sugar cane was not an activity unknown to the Portuguese,
nor was the slave trade. These two factors, along with the agricultural
conditions of the Pernambucan and Bahian coastal areas of Brazil, led to a
period of extreme productivity and profit for the Portuguese involved there
in sugar production.

The first African slaves are said to have arrived in Brazil around 1538
(Mattoso 1989). From then until the mid-nineteenth century, around 3.5
million Africans were brought to Brazilian slave ports. It is well known that
these slaves were not homogeneous in their culture, habits, ethnicity or
languages. Sudanese and Bantus came to Brazil in four great waves. The
first wave (also known as the Guinean wave) came from the north of the
equator, bringing mainly Wolofs, Mandingos, Songhais, Mossis, Hausas,
and Fulas to the Brazilian shores in the sixteenth century. The second wave
in the seventeenth century brought Bantus from equatorial and central
Africa by way of Angola and the Congo. The eighteenth century saw the
arrival of Sudanese (Kwa speakers) from the Mina coast (modern Ghana),
which were later followed by a fourth wave that came primarily from the
vicinity of the Bay of Benin. In the nineteenth century, despite the pressure
by the British to end the slave trade, Angolans and Mozambicans entered
Brazil as slaves until well after 1850 [cf. Goulart (1975), Schwartz (1985),
Silva (1988) and Guia brasileiro de fontes para a história da África, da
escravidão negra e do negro na sociedade atual (1988)]. Slavery was
finally abolished in Brazil on the thirteenth of May, 1888.
 71

During at least the first and second waves of slave imports, the ports of Cape
Verde, Guinea and São Tomé in West Africa were continuously used as
entrepôts for the slave trade [cf. Curtin (1969), Conrad (1977) and Coelho e
Mello (1988)]. This fact is important because of the linguistic experience
these slaves might have had in these locations, since Portuguese creoles
were spoken in all of them from the early sixteenth century onwards.
Another important event related to the importation of African slaves to
Brazil was the major immigration of Portuguese sugar planters and their
slaves from São Tomé that took place from the late sixteenth century and did
not end for the next two centuries (Ambrósio 1984). These planters were
fleeing pirate and maroon attacks and sought a new life in Brazil, bringing
with them a large number of their creole-speaking slaves.

It is not clear at this point how long the captured slaves had been kept in the
Portuguese factories before being shipped to Brazil. 19 The time involved is
relevant because during this interval the slaves were often christened and
probably learned some pidgin Portuguese, which was spoken in the slave
depots along the West coast of Africa. The trip to Brazil usually took
around two months; once there, the slaves would again spend some time in
factories, this time having their wounds and diseases treated and to gain

19The Portuguese factories, also called feitorias were the slaves's quarters during the period in which they
were prepared for the unfortunate life they were to have in the New World.
 72

weight to fetch a better price on the slave market. Once sold to their new
masters, the slaves were taken, usually in ethnolinguistically mixed groups
(Mattoso 1989), to the place they would live.

The historical account I have given so far has made no mention of creole
languages being spoken either on the farms or in the mines in Brazil. Most
authors refer to the slaves as speaking either their African languages or
Portuguese, the latter often imperfectly. These accounts, however, do not
make clear what exactly is meant by an 'imperfect' Portuguese variety, which
in the context under discussion could mean an interlanguage stage, a pidgin
or even a creole Portuguese.

It is important to bear in mind the varied range of conditions under which

slaves lived in Brazil. There were large sugar cane plantations, which
employed hundreds of people in the cultivation and processing of sugar.
Within these plantations there was a hierarchy among the slaves: the most
acculturated African-born slaves (ladinos) and the Brazilian-born slaves
(crioulos) were preferred in the sugar mills, while the boçais (less
acculturated African-born slaves) were more numerous in the field. A small
percentage of slaves - predominantly female - was also employed in the casa
grande or master's house, where they did household chores and took care of
the children. It was common practice for slave owners and white plantation
overseers to take black concubines who would bear their mulatto children.
The mulattos themselves often became overseers, farmers, or even
 73

merchants [cf. Pierson (1942) and Herskovits (1941) and (1969)].

Mining activities concentrated large numbers of slaves in the same locality

for extended periods of time. Some authors have claimed that African
languages survived in these areas for some time (cf. Machado 1943, Peixoto
1945), or that secret languages resulting from the relexification of
Portuguese by African lexical items eventually were adopted by the slave
population (cf. Queiroz 1984).

Farming activities in general employed a large number of slaves all around

the country. Cotton, tobacco and spice farms, although not as populous or as
large as the sugar plantations, were usually owned by Portuguese
immigrants, and later on by Brazilian-born whites or mulattos who worked
side by side with their slaves in the fields. The fact that owners and slaves
worked together on these farms lends support to the hypothesis that in such
environments slaves had more exposure to Portuguese than they had on
sugar plantations; on the other hand, owners and their families were also
more exposed to the Portuguese variety spoken by slaves, and were therefore
more prone to transfer some of its features in their own speech.

The main activities which opened up the interior were cattle raising and
prospecting. Both activities required permanent migration and population
replacement. These are supposed to be the principal reasons for the origin of
the highly mixed Brazilian population, as Indians, blacks and whites lived
 74

side by side in dwellings that did not allow for the hierarchical social
structure characteristic of large plantations and later urban areas. Again, this
is an important factor that contributed to dialectal leveling in colonial Brazil,
since speakers of different varieties of Portuguese, including the varieties of
Portuguese spoken as a second language by Africans and Indians, were in
very close contact, allowing for the spread of certain linguistic features
across a whole spectrum of language varieties.

3.2 The historical background of BVP

As noted in the previous section, Brazil's linguistic input was quite varied.
At first there were the indigenous languages that came into contact with the
EP spoken by the explorers. The letters and documents written shortly after
the discovery of Brazil report that in coastal areas most Indians spoke
closely related Tupi and Guarani languages. The migratory movements of
the indigenous peoples prompted by the arrival of the Portuguese and the
kinds of activities resulting from them ensued the emergence of Lingua
Geral, a koineized version of Tupi (cf. 5.2.2). This language had great
importance until the eighteenth century, because besides being used by the
whites for contact with the Indians, it is said that it was the native language
of a large number of mixed ancestry people in the Brazilian interior (cf.
Couto 1993). A variety of Lingua Geral is spoken until today in some river
border areas in the north of the country (cf. Rodrigues 1992).
 75

The linguistic situation on the plantations must have been chaotic at first.
Many different African languages were spoken by the newly arrived slaves.
It is not clear, at this point, how many of them could actually speak a type of
pidgin or creole Portuguese learned on the African coast, nor whether they
learned Lingua Geral upon arriving in Brazil. It is also quite possible that
early pidgins or even short-lived creoles developed in some of these
plantation regions. Although no historical documentation is yet known,
recent research in Brazil has suggested just such a scenario, e.g., the
description of the decreolizing speech of the isolated Helvécia community in
Bahia (cf. Ferreira 1985, Baxter 1992). 20 However, the Helvécia dialect
could well be a remnant of earlier BVP that survived the pressures imposed
by standard Portuguese longer.

3.2.1 Language patterns in colonial Brazil

Brazil, like many other countries in Latin America, had a varied linguistic
input in its colonial times. In order to assess the most relevant aspects of the
formation of BVP, the Brazilian colonial period will be divided into the

20 The Helvécia studies were carried out in a rural village in which the majority of the population is black.
The region used to be predominantly a coffee plantation area owned by German, Swiss, and French
immigrants. The linguistic features analysed in these studies show some similarities to those of creole
languages and part of the lexicon seems to be of Yoruba origin.
 76

stages proposed in Silva Neto (1963). This division is based on the clearly
different patterns of population movements in colonial Brazil which will be
discussed below.

3.2.1.1 The initial contact between the Portuguese,

indigenous peoples, and Africans

When the first Portuguese colonizers arrived on the Brazilian coast, they
immediately tried to establish contact with the indigenous peoples who
inhabited the land. As in every situation of cultural contact, both the
Portuguese and the indigenous peoples suffered, to some degree, a process
of acculturation (Ramos 1943). The Portuguese colonizers were simple
men, coming to a newly discovered land in search of fortune and a better life
than they had had in Portugal. At first, many were convicted criminals who
the Portuguese crown wanted to rid Portugal of. Most colonizers were
illiterate, single men, coming from different areas in Portugal and speaking
regional dialects of European Portuguese.

In order to relate to the inhabitants of the land, the Portuguese had to

establish a channel of communication with them. It is said that many
colonizers learned native languages, but most documents from colonial
times refer to the Lingua Geral as the principal language of contact between
the Portuguese and the indigenous peoples. According to Freyre (1977:257)
 77

and Calmon (1933:29-31), the Portuguese had to adapt to local conditions;

therefore, they not only learned new languages but also learned the Indians'
technique of building houses and fortified fences, also adopting manioc as
the basic staple of their diet.

The rate of intermarriage between Portuguese men and indigenous women

was very high, and the offspring of these marriages apparently spoke Lingua
Geral as their native language, learning Portuguese only in school (cf. Padre
Vieira, 1856-1857).

In some missionary writings by mostly Jesuits (cf. Leite 1938), we can find
examples of Portuguese spoken by the Indians as a second language.
Throughout the centuries of Brazilian colonization, Catholic missionaries,
especially Jesuits, tried not only to convert the Indians to Christianity, but
also to teach them Portuguese. Salvador (1918) says that the Indians could
not pronounce certain Portuguese phones. Therefore, a name such as
Francisco was pronounced as Pancicu, Luís as Duhi, cruz 'cross' as curuça,
barriga 'belly' as marika and espeto 'stick' as cepeto.

The contact between Portuguese and Africans was also very intense,
especially after the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the African
slave importation grew considerably due to an increase in economic
activities in Brazil. As in their relations with the Indians, the Portuguese
were greatly influenced by the Africans and vice-versa. The Portuguese
 78

fathered many mulatto children and frequently took female slaves as

concubines and sometimes wives. The contact between Africans and
Portuguese transcended the level of family life and can be felt today in all
areas of Brazilian life.

The distribution of African slaves in Brazil was very irregular, both

numerically and regionally. The numbers of slaves depended greatly on the
area in Brazil being explored as well on the type of economic activity being
developed. Ramos (1937) describes the main areas of African slave labor in
Brazil as the following (cf. Map I):

a- Bahia and Sergipe, northeastern states, from which slaves were sent
to raise tobacco, cocoa, and sugar cane and do domestic labor in the
coastal towns;

b- Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where slaves were mainly employed in
the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee, and in urban work as petty
merchants, artisans, messengers, house work, etc.;

c- Pernambuco, Alagoas and Paraíba, which were the greatest centers

of slave labor on sugar cane and cotton plantations;

d- Maranhão and Pará, where cotton plantations were predominant;

 79

e- Minas Gerais, the main area of mineral exploitation in the eighteenth

century, which later was expanded to Mato Grosso and Goiás.

MAP 1
Colonial Brazil
 80

It is not clear at this point what exactly were the languages spoken by the
newly arrived slaves in Brazil. From the historical documents available, it
has been established that languages from the Kwa and Bantu families were
the predominant first languages of African slaves. However, some authors
[as indicated in the following passage from Silva Neto (1963:39)] believe
that

coming originally from Lusitanian possessions, the blacks certainly

already spoke a creole-Portuguese dialect, because our language was a
general language on the African coast during the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (my translation, HRM).
 81

The earliest document attesting a sample of African slave speech in Brazil is

a popular song (Reisado) from Pernambuco, quoted in Romero (1897:183)
and repeated below: 21

O boio, Oh boi, 'Oh bull,

dare de banda, dá-lhe de banda, beat them in the sides'

Xipaia esse gente, espalha essa gente, 'spread these people'

Dare p'ra trage, dá-lhe para trás, 'beat them in the back'

E dare p'ra frente... e dá-lhe para frente... 'and beat them in the
front'

Vem mai p'ra baxo, vem mais para baixo, 'come a little lower'

Roxando no chão roçando no chão 'touching the ground'

E dá no pai Fidere, e dá no pai Fidélis, 'and beat father Fidelis'

Xipanta Bastião... espanta Sebastião... 'scare Sebastião'

21 Senteces in italics represent the original, followed by a Portuguese version and an English gloss.
 82

Vem p'ra meu banda vem para a minha banda 'come to my side'

Bem difacarinha... bem devagarzinho... 'very slowly'

Vai metendo a testa vai metendo a testa 'hit your forehead'

No cavalo-marinha no cavalo-marinho 'in the sea-horse'

O, ô, meu boio, oh, oh, meu boi 'oh, oh, my bull'

Desce desse casa. desce dessa casa 'come down from this
house'

Dança bem bonito dança bem bonito 'dance beautifully'

No meio da praça... no meio da praça 'in the middle of the

square'

Toca esse viola, toca essa viola 'play this guitar'

Pondo bem miúdo: pondo bem miúdo: 'playing very softly'

 83

Minha boio sabe meu boi sabe 'my bull knows how'

Dançá bem graúdo. dançar bem graúdo. 'to dance very fast'

In the above song, we can observe several features of restructured

Portuguese, such as:

(a) in the first verse, an extra vowel is added to boi 'bull', therefore
ensuing the form boio;

(b) the clitic lhe 'him' appears as re, possibly coming from the
depalatalized form le;

(c) in the verb espalhar 'to spread' there is metathesis of /is/ to /si/,
resulting in xipaia, with the preferred consonant-vowel syllable
structure;

(d) lack of gender agreement in esse gente (cf. P essa gente) 'these
people', with the use of the masculine determiner form with a
feminine noun; the same feature is present in: meu banda (cf. P
minha banda) 'my side', desse casa (cf. P dessa casa) 'from this
house', esse viola (cf. P essa viola) 'this guitar'. Similarly minha
boio (cf. P meu boi) 'my bull', in which a femine determiner is used
with a masculine noun;
 84

(e) the word trás 'back' appears as trage /traze/, with the addition of a
vowel at the end of the word to ensure the preferred consonant-
vowel syllable structure.

In chapter five the speech of Indians and African slaves, as well as the
regional dialects of European Portuguese, will be discussed in more detail in
the context of their contribution to the formation of modern BVP.

3.2.1.2 Portuguese immigration patterns

A basic fact that has to be taken into consideration in the discussion of

immigration movements is related to the socio-economic and cultural level
of the immigrant. For the Portuguese colonizers who came to Brazil, class
divisions were very clear. There was the upper class, represented by
administration representatives, plantation owners, their families and
relatives. Priests could also be included in this class, given that they were
the cultural elite of the country, being in charge of all educational resources,
including those for upper class children. Once in Brazil, the upper class
tended to intermarry among themselves, although as mentioned before, it
 85

was common for white men to father mulatto children out of wedlock.
Mulattos were not usually regarded as legitimate heirs of land owners,
which is why so few people of known mixed ancestry belonged to the upper
class in early colonial Brazil.

The lower classes were made up of poor whites, who mostly came from the
rural areas and poor urban neighborhoods of several Portuguese regions.
These people were illiterate and spoke regional varieties of Portuguese.
Upon arriving in Brazil, they intermarried with Indians and Africans, which
gave rise to a large mixed population.

The language varieties spoken by the upper and lower classes were thus
quite distinct from the beginning. While the upper class spoke the
prestigious EP of cultural centers like Lisbon and Coimbra, the lower classes
spoke vernacular EP.

In Brazil, as well as in India, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and other Portuguese
colonies the lower classes provided the Portuguese input matrix for both the
indigenous peoples and the African slaves. The Portuguese laborers came
from Madeira, the Azores, Porto, the Alantejo, Minho and Lisbon (cf. Silva
Neto 1963:45). Therefore, it is rather unlikely that any one particular EP
vernacular dialect had overriding importance in the formation of BVP; in
fact, it is much more likely that some type of dialectal leveling occurred in
colonial Brazil, given the varied sources of remnants of archaic Portuguese
 86

found in present day BVP (cf. 5.2.1).

3.2.2 Slavery and language contact in Brazil

In order to better understand the overall linguistic scenario in colonial

Brazil, this period will be divided in three phases as proposed by Silva Neto
(1963:73). This division is based upon important historical events that had
major consequences for the linguistic make up of Brazil. Furthermore, these
three phases also correspond to distinct population distribution and
immigration patterns in colonial Brazil.

Although the discovery of Brazil occurred in 1500, it was only in 1532 that
colonization began. As will be shown below, this initial stage extended until
1654, when the Dutch were expelled from Brazil. The second period starts
in 1654 and lasts until 1808, when the Portuguese court moved to Brazil to
escape Napoleon. The third period, which starts with the arrival of the royal
family lasts until the end of the nineteenth century, when slavery was
abolished and the equilibrium between the city and rural areas started
changing in Brazil.

3.2.2.1 The beginnings (1532-1654)

 87

The early years of colonization were marked by the effort of the small white
population to train indigenous slaves for work related to the exploitation of
wood and the search for precious stones. Although the Indians were
excellent guides in the exploratory trips into the Brazilian hinterland, it was
soon clear to the Portuguese that they were not adapted for the sedentary life
required by agriculture and mining.

During the second half of the sixteenth century, Indians, whites and
mamelucos (the mixed children of Indians and whites) communicated
through the Lingua Geral. Many whites, as well as Indians were bilingual
(Silva Neto 1963:74). The majority of the Brazilian population at this point
was concentrated in coastal Pernambuco, Bahia, Espírito Santo, and Rio de
Janeiro. The hinterlands of São Paulo had not yet been explored, although
an initial attempt had already been made.

In the final decades of the sixteenth century the African slave trade brought
around 30,000 people from the Guinea coast (Mattoso 1989:41) to
Pernambuco and Bahia, where sugar plantations were beginning to be very
profitable. The first African slaves worked side by side with Indian slaves,
which might have led to their learning Lingua Geral. However, in a few
years, the overwhelming majority of slaves in the sugar fields were of
African origin. This fact prompted a change in the linguistic scenario in the
sugar cane areas, since Lingua Geral was not the contact language any
longer, probably being replaced by a simplified form of Portuguese, such as
 88

a pidgin.

The limited demographic information remaining from the sixteenth century

indicates the following as the population make up in Brazil in 1587 (Silva
Neto 1963:79):

TABLE 1
Brazilian population in 1587

Location Whites Indians Africans

Bahia 12,000 8,000 2 to 4,000
Pernambuco 8,000 2,000 10,000
S. Vicente 1,500 1,000 ------------
Rio de Janeiro 750 3,000 100
Espírito Santo 750 4,500 ------------
 89

Porto Seguro 750 ------------- ------------

Ilhéus 750 ------------- ------------
Itamaracá 250 ------------- ------------
Brazilian population in 1587, according to Silva Neto (1963:79)

From 1600 to 1640 the sugar industry in Brazil consolidated its strength in
consequence of the large number of African slaves involved in this activity.
According to Mattoso (1989:41) during this period between "500,00 to
550,000 slaves from the Guinea coast and especially Angola were imported
by traders who were themselves landowners or planters". These slaves were
absorbed primarily by the sugar plantations in Bahia and Pernambuco.
 90

3.2.2.2 The golden era (1654 - 1808)

The expelling of the Dutch from Pernambuco coincided with a slowing

down in the sugar industry in Brazil. The Dutch, after learning the necessary
techniques for sugar production in Brazil, migrated to the Antilles, where
they had an enormous success in this activity. By 1670 Portugal had lost its
monopoly on sugar sales not only to the Dutch, but also to the French and
British, who had also established colonies in the Antilles (Mattoso 1989:41).

On the other hand, at the same time that the sugar industry showed signs of
stagnation, gold was found in the province of Minas Gerais. This created a
 91

new demand for labor and immensely increased the volume of the slave
trade. According to Mattoso (1989), as many as 1,700,000 slaves were
imported from Angola and the Mina Coast in Africa to supply the new needs
for labor.

The discovery of gold and precious stones in Minas Gerais, Goiás and Mato
Grosso drastically changed not only the economy of Brazil, but also altered
the patterns of slave delivery and distribution, which ultimately affected the
country's linguistic situation. During the sugar cane boom slaves were
delivered directly to the ports in the areas in which they would be working.
With the golden age, slaves still had to be delivered to the same ports in
Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio, but from there they had to be distributed to the
far off areas in the hinterlands where their labor was required.

The population of the inland areas was made up of people from coastal
areas, including lower-class whites, people of mixed ancestry, some Indians
and a large number of slaves brought from the coastal sugar plantation areas
as well as newly arrived African slaves.

This influx of people was constantly renewed as the immigration rate from
Portugal increased along with that from Africa. At this time, people had an
itinerant life style, moving from one area to another searching for new
sources of wealth, giving rise to new villages in inland Brazil.
 92

According to some authors, this largely mixed population spoke a creole

language (cf. Silva Neto 1963:82); however, this remains controversial since
no document that attests this fact beyond doubt has yet been found. Other
authors prefer to cautiously refer to a 'broken' Portuguese being spoken by
the inland population. There are also references to regions in which African
languages were spoken by the slave population (cf. Castro 1980).

As the African element increased in Brazil, the indigenous population

diminished or moved inland, taking along with it the Lingua Geral. By the
end of the eighteenth century Lingua Geral was still spoken in the province
of São Paulo, some isolated hinterland areas, and especially in Pará and
Amazonas (in the Amazonic area). According to Silva Neto (1963:109) the
population of the hinterlands progressively became more and more mixed
and black. The same author also affirms that the language of the mixed
population was far 'worse' than that of the urban whites, and that of the
blacks (including creoles, ladinos and boçais) was still farther from that of
the whites.

Silva Neto (idem) refers to the spread existence of a semi-creole in Brazil,

which he defines as "a developed stage of the primitive learning represented
by a creole language", which in modern linguistics is called a post-creole or
decreolized creole. The same author, reasoning along these same lines,
insists that this "semi-creole" resulted from the contact between a
Portuguese-based creole and the Portuguese language. The former, in his
 93

view point, gradually absorbed more and more Portuguese words and
structures.

There are innumerable references to the mutual influence of the Portuguese

spoken at the time by upper class whites, lower class whites, and people of
mixed ancestry, Africans and Indians (cf. Gama 1837 in Freyre 1977,
Laytano 1936 ). 22 , 23 The fact that even upper class whites born in Brazil
and raised by slaves spoke a 'broken' Portuguese, leads to the question as to
who spoke standard Portuguese natively in colonial Brazil, other than the
upper class European immigrants.

Prazeres (circa 1819), referring to the language situation in Maranhão at the

time, says:

At the moment the current language in Brazil is Portuguese; the

literate can speak it very well; however among the illiterate there

22 According to Gama (1837): " Maneiras, linguagem, vícios, tudo nos inocula essa gente sáfara e
brutal...Com pretos e pretas boçais, e com os filhinhos destes vivemos desde que abrimos os olhos, e como
poderá ser a nossa boa educação?... Lidando quase só com os escravos os meninos adquirem uma
linguagem viciosa, e montesina, e os mais grosseiros modos" (sic).
'Manners, language, vices... these brutal and savage people innoculate us with all of those things. We live
with Africans and with their children from the time we are born, therefore how could we have a good
upbringing?...Being only with slaves, our children learn a vicious and barbaric language, and the rudest
manners' (my translation, HRM).'

23Laytano (1936:11) refering to the contact between blacks and whites said: "(..) os brancos ... não tinham
outros recursos senão expressar-se na mesma linguagem de patuá dos negros" (sic). 'The whites didn' thave
another choice other than expressing themselves in the same 'patois' spoken by the blacks' (my translation,
HRM).
 94

is still a certain dialect, which on my view, is the result of the

mixture of the languages spoken by the diverse ethnic groups that
have inhabited the land. (My translation, HRM).

The scenario described above starts to change at the end of the eighteenth
century and shifts dramatically with the transfer of the Portuguese court to
Rio de Janeiro in 1808, as will be discussed in the next section.

3.2.2.3 From the arrival of the royal family to the end of

slavery (1808 - 1888)

The golden age started showing signs of decline in the late eighteenth
century. This prompted once again a change in economic activities as well
as of population movements in Brazil.

The sugar cane production saw its second surge in the late 1700's, as soon as
the gold rush and diamond rush slowed down. Slave labor then moved
mainly to the coastal areas during the period from 1787 to 1820 according to
Mattoso (1989:41). Sugar cane at this time was cultivated not only in
northeastern Brazil but also in the captaincies of Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo.
 95

Little by little new agricultural activities were introduced and by the 1820's
coffee production became the major economic activity in Brazil, changing
once again the country's economic axis. The need for slave labor became so
overwhelming that the volume of trade remained steady and even increased
after 1820. Mattoso (1989:42) states that the coffee industry absorbed
almost 100% of the 1,350,000 slaves imported from the Mina Coast, the
Congo, Angola and Mozambique during this period. She goes on to say that
from that total, at least 570,000 captives were imported via the port of Rio
de Janeiro, by far the most important point of slave arrival at the time.

The demand for labor also led to the development of internal slave trade, and
a major shift of manpower from the sugar industry (in northeastern Brazil) to
the coffee industry (in southeastern Brazil) took place. This internal trade
underwent a vast expansion after 1850. These journeys were usually made
by ship and riverboats, on foot through overland routes, and eventually by
railroad in the state of São Paulo. Mattoso (1989:51) calculates that a total
of 209,000 slaves were moved within Brazil between 1850 and 1888.

TABLE 2
Regional Brazilian slave population compared to total regional population in
1819

REGION TOTAL POPULATION SLAVE POPULATION % SLAVE POPULATION

 96

NORTH 143,251 39,040 27.3

NORTHEAST 1,112,703 367,520 33

EAST 1,807,638 508,351 28.1

SOUTH 433,976 125,283 28.9

CENTER-WEST 100,564 40,980 40.7

TOTAL 3,598,132 1,081,174 30

Source: Skidmore (1976:57)

 97

TABLE 3
Regional Brazilian slave population compared to total regional population in
1872

REGION TOTAL POPULATION SLAVE POPULATION % SLAVE POPULATION

NORTH 332,847 28,437 8.5

NORTHEAST 3,082,701 289,962 9.4

EAST 4,735,427 925,141 19.5

SOUTH 1,558,691 249,947 16

CENTERWEST 220,812 17,319 7.8

TOTAL 9,930,478 1,510,806 15

Source: Skidmore (1976:57)

 98

The Portuguese immigration to Brazil continued to be stable until 1808,

when it increased substantially with the coming of the royal family to Rio.
However, while Portuguese immigrants had in previous periods been lower
class workers, now it was not only the Portuguese nobility, but also
intellectuals and upper class people fleeing the Napoleonic invasion.

This change in immigration altered Brazilian intellectual life considerably.

After the arrival of D. João VI, the arts and letters in Brazil prospered.
Schools, colleges and the first university were opened and the press, the
theater and the arts were developed.

The Brazilian upper classes were concentrated in the cities, and it was
fashionable for the rich to reside at the court, Rio de Janeiro. The emerging
middle classes and even a small portion of the lower classes started having
access to primary schools, and the number of mulatto intellectuals and artists
increased significantly.

After the arrival of the royal family the division between the rural and urban
dialects became even more evident, initiating a linguistic pattern that can be
currently observed in Brazil. The language variety people spoke reflected
not necessarily their ethnic origin but more likely their place of origin and
social status. Therefore, it is likely that in an urban scenario, due to more
access to schooling added to a larger number of native speakers of standard
 99

Portuguese, even lower class whites, people of mixed ancestry and blacks
spoke a more standardized variety of Brazilian Portuguese. On the other
hand, in a rural scenario, where the schooling was not readily available and
models of standard Portuguese were scarce, even upper class whites were
more likely to be native speakers of some form of restructured Portuguese,
as much as lower class whites, people of mixed ancestry and blacks.

The period following 1888, year in which slavery was abolished in Brazil,
saw an enormous influx of former slaves into the cities. Slave labor was
substituted in many areas by immigrants coming from European and Arab
countries, as well as Japan in the beginning of the twentieth century. This
pattern of population migration from the country to the city has not yet
ceased until today.

3.3 The relationship between demographics and language

development in colonial Brazil

Mussa (1991:163) provides a table with the population distribution by ethnic

group in Brazil from the beginning of colonization to the end of the imperial
era. In his study, Mussa divided the Brazilian population into the following
groups: Africans, Afro-Brazilians, mulattos, white Brazilians, Europeans and
integrated Indians. These groupings, although not ideal (because we cannot
entirely know the proportions of the black population that spoke any one
 100

specific language, nor the number of Indians who spoke Lingua Geral and
some variety of Portuguese, and not even the proportion of whites who
spoke some form of restructured Portuguese natively), are nonetheless
helpful to the extent that they provide us with basic ethnic divisions, which
can lead us to some conclusions about the percentages of each population
group in Brazil, as will be shown below.

TABLE 4
Population distribution by ethnic groups in Brazil from 1538 to 1890

1538 to 1600 1601 to 1700 1701 to 1800 1801 to 1850 1851 to 1890

Africans 20% 30% 20% 12% 2%

Afro-Brazilians - 20% 21% 19% 13%

Mulattos - 10% 19% 34% 42%

White Brazilians - 5% 10% 17% 24%

Europeans 30% 25% 22% 14% 17%

Integrated Indians 50% 10% 8% 4% 2%

Source: Mussa (1991:163)

 101

From table 4 we see that there was never a period in colonial and imperial
Brazil when the white population was the majority. Indians were the
majority in the first period (from 1538 to 1600), but they were replaced by
the blacks and mulattos combined as the majority in all subsequent periods.
These facts can be better appreciated in the graph below:
 102

Table 4 above reveals that, even if for the sake of argumentation, we

assumed that all the Brazilian-born white population spoke some form of
standard Portuguese (which we know does not correspond to the reality), we
would still be faced with an overwhelming percentage of the population
which either spoke no Portuguese, spoke Portuguese as a second language or
a restructured variety of Portuguese as a first or second language. This latter
group, made up of Africans, Afro-Brazilians, people of mixed ancestry and
Indians made up nearly 60 to 70% of the population during the entire period
between 1538 and 1890.

The same data indicates that while the Indians made up 50% of the
population in the first period, they declined to 10%, 8%, 4% and finally to
2%. At the same time, the African population grew from 20% to 30% in the
second period, later declining to 20% again, and finally reaching 12% and
 103

2% respectively. The Afro-Brazilian population, which did not exist in the

first period, made up 20% of the population in the second period, then
increased to 21%, and later fell to 19% and 13%. The mulatto population
increased throughout all five periods. It did not exist between 1538 and
1600; in the second period it grew to 10%, then to 19%, 34% and 42%
respectively in the next periods.

This demographic picture of the Brazilian population from the beginning of

the colonial time until the end of the nineteenth century can be compared to
figures for schooling to better explain language transmission in Brazil.
Mattos e Silva (1995) states that until the eighteenth century only 0.5% of
the Brazilian population had access to schooling. This increases to around
20 to 30% during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This sudden
increase in literacy was brought about by the arrival of the Portuguese royal
family in the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. section 3.2.2.3).

According to Mattos e Silva (ibid.:83), less than 25% of all those who start
primary school in Brazil today are able to finish it. This fact does not even
consider the percentage of the population that does not have access to any
schooling at all. These numbers show that the opportunity to learn the
standard language has not, throughout history, been easily accessible to the
lower income groups and make it unsurprising that BVP is the language
variety spoken by the majority of Brazilians.
 104

3.4 Summary

In this chapter the relations between population groups and linguistic

patterns in colonial Brazil were explored. It was shown that there were
several different factors that defined the migration movements to and within
Brazil and the consequent contact between different groups and languages.

We have shown through demographic data that the majority of Brazilians

from the beginning of colonization, have always been non-whites (blacks,
Indians and people of mixed ancestry), with the white element (at first
representing the only native speakers of Portuguese) remaining at
approximately 30% of the population. This percentage only changed
significantly due to European immigration in the last half of the nineteenth
century, when it increased to 41% of the population.
 105

The social history of BVP associated with the demographic data put forth in
this chapter strongly suggests that in all probability there was complete
normal transmission of EP only among upper class urban whites in colonial
and imperial Brazil. Because the majority of the Brazilian population
initially consisted of native speakers of Amerindian and African languages,
and later their descendants, it is most likely that contact languages including
some form of restructured Portuguese (both pidgins and creoles brought to
Brazil by the African slaves and varieties which developed in Brazil, as well
as Portuguese acquired incompletely as a second language), acquired first as
a second language and later on as a first language, were the predominant
language varieties during that period of Brazil's history. These facts help
account for the linguistic fact that today the vernacular language of Brazil is
highly divergent from European and standard Brazilian Portuguese, as will
be discussed in the chapters ahead.
 106

CHAPTER 4

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF BVP

4.0 General remarks

The vernacular language spoken in Brazil today can be represented by a

continuum extending from a partially restructured variety of Portuguese
 107

spoken by uneducated people at one extreme (especially in rural, isolated

areas, e.g. Helvécia Portuguese) to a near standard BP spoken by urban
populations at the other (cf. Guy 1981, Holm 1987). Despite some regional
and dialectal variation most salient on the phonetic and lexical levels, the
grammar of the various nonstandard lects spoken by uneducated people
throughout the country seems to be rather similar (cf. Azevedo 1989). This
fact raises the question as to whether BVP had a single place of origin and
later on was spread throughout the country by population movements, or
whether it is the result of independent outcomes of different restructurings in
different parts of the country at distinct periods. The grammatical features
discussed in this chapter characterize the more nonstandard varieties of BP,
prevalent especially in rural areas, that have been documented throughout
Brazil in the literature (cf. Mendonça 1933, Raimundo 1933, Ribeiro 1933,
Marroquim 1934).

In order to better establish the distinguishing features of BVP, a comparative

approach will be followed, in which BVP will be compared to language
varieties that are relevant to the understanding of the nature of its genesis
because they may shed light on language contact induced change (cf. the
Portuguese-based creoles of West Africa) and language internal processes
(cf. archaic Portuguese).

However, before presenting this analysis, a word about the definition of

archaic Portuguese is in order. In Portuguese philological works this label,
 108

by convention, refers to the Portuguese language between the twelfth

century and the end of the sixteenth century (cf. Coutinho 1972:57). The
archaic period has been identified in the literature as having a cluster of
features that differentiates it from modern Portuguese (seventeenth century
until today). Archaic Portuguese examples utilized in this dissertation are
drawn from literature written during the relevant period.

In this chapter data on the distinguishing features of Brazilian Portuguese

will be presented; however, an evaluation of their significance regarding the
genesis of BVP will not be discussed until chapter five after thoroughly
exploring theories that may explain the paths that led to the current features
of BVP. Relevant data leading to that discussion will be presented below,
namely data from archaic Portuguese that may indicate language-internal
processes as well as data from language varieties resulting from contact,
such as the West African Portuguese creoles.

It is also important to note that my inclusion of data from the West African
Portuguese-based creoles does not imply the assumption of a creole origin
for BVP here. The theory of creolization, along with language drift,
language shift and borrowing will be examined in chapter five. Creole data
are important in as much as they indicate possible restructuring processes
that may have occurred in BVP, which are not necessarily related to
pidginization and creolization (cf. imperfect language shift). Furthermore, it
would be only natural that some West African creoles share contact features
 109

with BVP, since both had quite similar linguistic inputs, that is, archaic
Portuguese and Niger Congo languages, not to mention possible universal
effects of second-language learning strategies that had to be adopted by the
large numbers of Africans who had to abandon their mother tongues in
Africa or later in Brazil [cf. Andersen (1983) and Schumann (1978) for
possible parallels between creolization/pidginization and natural second
language acquisition].

With these guidelines in mind, let us proceed to the identification of the

distinguishing features of BVP.

4.1 Lexico-semantics

One of the first aspects of BVP that struck scholars as being significantly
different from EP and likely to have resulted from language contact was a
large component of its lexicon. Authors such as Raimundo (1933),
Mendonça (1935), Senna (1940) and Rossi (1963) identified BVP words
from Yoruba and Bantu languages. More recent studies that have also
focused attention on lexicon include Megenney (1978, 1989 and 1991) and
Holm (1987 and 1994). Schneider (1991) is an entire dictionary dedicated
to African borrowings in BP. Besides BVP found in oral texts and
interviews, its sources of data include newspapers, magazines and books in
which SBP is used, which attests to the widespread use of African-derived
 110

lexical items even in varieties considered standard in Brazil.

Several scholars have also identified a large number of lexical items in BVP
borrowed from Tupi and Guarani languages. These include Sampaio (1928),
Monteiro ( 1931), and Ayrosa (1937).

It is also important to note that many of the so-called lexical differentiations

between BP and EP reflect the different evolutionary paths Portuguese
followed in Portugal and in Brazil. Several lexical items that are today
unknown in Portugal were brought to Brazil by the early colonizers who
spoke regional varieties of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European
Portuguese. As in any natural language evolution process, EP has since
adopted new words and borrowed lexical items from other languages. The
same process has occurred in BP; however, some archaic lexemes that
dropped out of use in EP have been maintained in BP, some of which have
undergone phonological processes that distance them further from their
original sources, while others have undergone changes in their semantic
range. The following is an example of such a change, in which
grammaticalization led to a bleaching of the semantics of a phrase, resulting
in its evolution into a preposition:

(41) pamode ~ pumode ~ pramode (< archaic P por amor de 'for love
of') 'to, in order to'
 111

Archaisms can be found in the form, the meaning or both form and meaning
in BVP lexical items as shown below (cf. Amaral 1920 [1976:56-57]):

(42) Archaisms in word form:

ermão (P irmão) 'brother'

saluço (P soluço) 'hiccup'
somana (P semana) 'week' 24

(43) Archaisms in meaning (i.e., words that retain their archaic meanings
in present day BVP, as opposed to the current usage of other words to
express these meanings in SBP):

dona 'mrs.' (current form: P senhora)

função 'dance-party' (current form: P baile)
praça 'town' (current form: P povoado)

(44) Archaisms in word form and meaning (i.e., the words listed present a
different form and meaning in current SBP) :

contia (P qualquer quantidade) 'any amount'

24 It would be more reasonable that semana were the archaic form, since in principle it originated from the
Latin word for seven, yielding the form septimana. However, in the literature on archaic Portuguese I
consulted, somana is given as the archaic Portuguese form for 'week'.
 112

modinha (P cançoneta) 'song'

punir (P defender) 'to defend'

Melo (1981:149) suggests that in order to be better understood, the BP

lexicon should be approached from different perspectives to deal with all the
linguistic components responsible for the evolution of a language. Among
these, he mentions the effect of language contact on lexical borrowings, the
creative word formation processes used by speakers of any natural language
and the maintenance of archaic lexical features. Although Melo tends to
minimize the importance of language contact in his analysis, I believe his
basic principles to be correct.

The large component of BP words derived from Amerindian and African

languages which are absent in EP attests to the importance of these
languages in the formation of modern BVP. These words are not restricted
to specific semantic areas such as geographical and culinary vocabulary, as
many claim. Here again, taking into consideration Brazilian history, it is
only natural that many geographical terms were originally borrowed from
Amerindian languages, especially Tupi and Guarani, since their speakers
were the local inhabitants of Brazil at the time of arrival of the Portuguese,
and they naturally already had terms to identify notable features of the
landscape. Much of this terminology was later adopted by the Portuguese
and their descendants, many of whom spoke the form of Tupi called Lingua
Geral (cf. section 3.2).
 113

Nor is it surprising to find culinary terms from African languages in BP.

Since slaves began arriving in Brazil, African women were usually the
caretakers in Brazilian homes, not only cooking but raising children as well,
serving as their models for first language acquisition.

However, the scope of the lexical influence of Amerindian and African

languages was very broad. Brazilian culture today is a mixture of the Indian,
African and European legacies, a pattern which has been present in Brazil
from the beginning of its colonization. That can be attested by observing
our music, dance, religious traditions and our way of perceiving life. In all
these realms, the tricultural element is present and manifested in a vast
number of lexical items.

Several works concerning Tupi lexical influence on BP have been written.

Some of these are general books on BP grammar and lexicon, which include
sections on this topic (cf. Monteiro 1931, Nascentes 1933). Others
specifically deal with Tupi and its widespread influence on both vernacular
and standard BP (cf. Ayrosa 1937, Sampaio 1928). From these works we
can extract innumerable examples of Tupi words which have been either
adopted without change into BP or have undergone phonological and
morphological processes in order to comply with a more Portuguese-like
structure. Examples are presented below:
 114

(45) capenga 'broken, defective in one leg' [< Tupi cã-penga 'broken
bone' (cã 'core, bone'; penga 'to break, broken')] (Ayrosa
1937:103)

(46) cumbuca 'round dish with a large opening on its top' [< Tupi
cuimbuc] (Ayrosa 1937:157)

(47) peteca 'round toy with feathers in a bunch on its upper part used in a
game of the same name' [< Tupi peteg 'to hit, to punch'] (Ayrosa
1937:191-192)

Holm (1994) provides a list of idioms present in BVP and absent in

European Portuguese which have a parallel structure and semantic range in
idioms in creole languages and their relevant African substrate languages.
An example of these is the following:

Holm (1994:9)
(48) BVP: olho comprido
eye long

English Creole: long eye

Igbo: aña suso

long eye
 115

all 'greedy'

Schneider (1991) provides the following African etymologies for some very
frequent words in BVP:

(49) cochilar 'to sleep lightly or to doze off' [Bantu cf Kimbundu koshila,
with same meaning] (p. 120)

(50) jiló 'the fruit of the jiloeiro, used in cooking' [Bantu cf. Kimbundu
njilu] (p. 168)

(51) vatapá 'a typical dish of Bahian cuisine' [W Afr cf. Yoruba vatápa]
(p. 282)

Castro (1980) developed a research project in which she tried to locate the
African cultural presence in Brazil, departing from a linguistic analysis of
the lexicon in the state of Bahia. It is well known that this is the Brazilian
state with the most African influence where African religious traditions are
kept up. The state of Bahia also represents a point of confluence because it
received slaves from different linguistic areas in Africa and can be said to
follow the same pattern of slave distribution that occurred in the rest of the
country.
 116

Castro (idem) was able to identify 1950 words of African origin, of which
64.4% belong to the semantic realm of religion and 35.6% to conversational
Portuguese. These words are of both Bantu and West African origin, as
shown below:

TABLE 5
Words of African origin

Religious Conversation Total

Bantu 34.3% 77.3% 49.6%
West African 65.7% 22.7% 50.4%

These data revealed that the Bantu influence on the BVP conversational
lexicon is larger than the West African given the number of borrowings and
derived words currently used in Brazil. These lexical items are not
perceived by the speakers as being of African origin, especially because they
follow Portuguese morphophonological rules (cf. molambo 'rag',
esmolambar 'to make into rags', molambento 'wearing rags', maconha
'marijuana', maconheiro 'one who smokes marijuana'). The fact that the
 117

terms related to slavery are all of Bantu origin is also noteworthy, suggesting
that the Bantu languages were the ones introduced earliest in Brazil, given
the fact that most of that terminology has been used in writings about sugar
plantations from the time of their inception in Brazil (cf. quilombo 'a refuge
established by fugitive slaves [< Kimbundo kilombo], senzala 'the
plantation's slave quarters [< Kimbundu sanzala], mucama 'a young female
slave chosen for household duties' [< Kimbundu mukama], etc.). Bantu
words are also present in the religious realm (cf. candomblé 'an Afro-
Brazilian cult' [< Kimbundu ka 'custom' + Kikongo ndombe 'a black
person'], as well as macumba 'common term in Rio de Janeiro for a cult
which would be called candomblé in Bahia [ < Kimbundu makumba 'a sound
that shocks or frightens']and umbanda 'multi-class Brazilian religion' [ <
Kimbundu umbanda 'art of curing, magic']).

As for words of West African origin, they were introduced into BVP more
recently than those of Bantu origin; besides usually being part of religious
terminology, they are perceived by speakers as being of African origin (cf.
orixás 'deities' [ < Yoruba orisha 'anything one worships'], rum 'the largest
of three drums used in Candomblé' [< Fon hun], rumpi 'middle sized drum' [
< Fon hun], lé or runlé 'a small drum' [ < Yoruba omele].

4.2 Phonology
 118

Studies of BVP have long pointed out the striking differences between this
language's phonology and that of most EP dialects and (to a lesser degree)
SBP. However, many of the analyses so far proposed imply that these
differences are attributable solely to EP archaisms or the phonology of
regional or social dialects during the colonial period (cf. Silva Neto 1963).
Although archaic vernacular Portuguese (AP) certainly left its imprint on
modern BVP (as discussed in chapter five), so did African, creole and
indigenous languages.

The most basic similarity between BVP and the Portuguese-based creoles of
Africa (examples from São Tomense [ST] and Cape Verdean [CV] will be
provided), and their African substrate languages (those affecting the Gulf of
Guinea [São Tomense Creole Portuguese] but not Upper Guinea Creole
Portuguese [Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese]) is a tendency towards the
canonic syllabic pattern consonant-vowel. This feature seems to be
widespread in second-language learning and language simplification, and
apparently also affected the formation of EP through the acquisition of Latin
influenced by the phonotactic rules of Iberian substrate languages (Bueno
1955).

As will be shown below, BVP has an interesting syllabic structure, pointing

towards both the simplification of standard Portuguese phonotactic rules
and possibily the transfer of the syllabic patterns of African languages in an
earlier period of second-language acquisition.
 119

4.2.1 Phonotactic rules

The syllabic pattern consonant-vowel may be achieved through the addition

or deletion of vowels:

(52) Epenthesis:
BVP: fulô (< P flor)
AP: felor
'flower'
ST: galufu (< P garfo)
'fork'

(53) Apheresis:
BVP: maginá (<P imaginar)
AP: maginar
'to imagine'

BVP: ba∫á (< P abaixar)

CV: basa (<P abaixar)
'to lower'
 120

ST: zulu (<P azul)

'blue'

The consonant-vowel structure may also be achieved by dropping vowels or

consonants:

(54) Syncope (middle):

BVP: peda (<P pedra)
'stone'
BVP: comeno (<P comendo)
'eating'

(55) Apocope (end):

BVP, AP: el (<P ele, ela)
'he, she'

BVP, CV: pusivi (<P possível)

'possible'

ST: natá (<P natal)

'Christmas'
 121

BVP: comê (<P comer)

'to eat'

CV: pensá (<P pensar)

'to think'

ST: gΩvená (<P governar)

'to govern'

Other phonological processes that have affected BVP are the following:

(56) Vocalization of palatal /¥/ to /y/ and /ñ/ to /~y):

BVP, AP, CV: fiyu (<P filho)
'son'

BVP, CV: meyΩ' (<P melhor)

'better'

BVP, ST: foya (<P folha)

'leaf'

BVP: mui˜y(u) (<P moinho )

'mill'
 122

BVP: cami˜y(u) (<P caminho)

'path'

Holm (1988:123) points out that the realization of the palatal nasal as a nasal
glide /˜y/ is present in Haitian Creole French (cf. "g˜E˜y˜E" 'to have'),
Papiamentu Creole Spanish and Príncipe Creole Portuguese. Holm also
notes that the nasal glide is a feature of West African languages but not of
the European lexical source languages of the creoles.

(57) Alternation of [l] and [r] in syllable final position:

BVP, CV: arto (<P alto) 25
'tall'

BVP: gaufo: r-> l-> u/ -# (<P garfo)

'fork'

ST: fili (<P ferir)

'to hurt'

(58) Paragogue:
BVP, AP: dori (<P dor)
'pain'

25 Cf. Old Papiamentu borbe, now bolbe .

 123

BVP: dotori, ST: dotolo (<P doutor)

'doctor'

BVP: mEli, ST: mElE (<P mel)

'honey'

(59) Simplification of complex syllabic nuclei:

/ai/->/a/
BVP, AP: caxa (<P caixa)
'box'

/ou/->/o/
BVP, CV: toru (<P touro)
'bull'

/ui/->/u/
BVP, CV, ST: m˜utu, mutu (<P muito)
'very, much'

/ei/->/e/
BVP: pexe (<P peixe)
'fish'
 124

ST: plume (<P primeiro)

Papiamentu: pr[u,o]mé
'first'

/ão/->/õ/
BVP: patrõ (<P patrão)
'boss'

/ia/->/a/
BVP: istóra (<P estória)
'story'

/iE/->/E/
BVP, Papiamentu: kEtu (<P quieto)
'quiet'

/iu/->/u/
BVP: negoçu (<P negócio)
'business'

/ua/->/a/
BVP: aga (<P água)
'water'
 125

/ua/->/o/
BVP: kõtu (<P quanto)
'how much'

(60) Palatalization of /t/ and /d/ before the high front vowel /i/ (as in
southern Kongo, a substrate language of São Tomense Creole Portuguese,
cf. Holm 1988:130-131):
Holm(1988:131)
BVP, ST: k˜eci (<P quente, SBP [k˜e/t,c/i])
'hot'

Southern Kongo: cina /tina/

'to cut'

4.2.2 Phonological aspects of morphological processes

As will be seen in 4.3, one of the most striking characteristics of BVP is the
lack of noun phrase number agreement (NPA) and subject-verb agreement
(SVA) as compared to SBP.

NPA in SBP is marked through the addition of a plural morpheme -s at the

 126

end of most NP components. 26 However, there are a few other rules that
operate in exceptional cases, such as nouns ending in -ão, for which the
plural morphemes are -ães, -ãos, or -ões (e.g. pão -> pães 'bread'; irmão ->
irmãos 'brother', limão -> limões 'lemon'). 27 Nouns ending in -l take -is in
the plural: animal -> animais 'animal', anel -> anéis 'ring', lençol ->lençóis
'bed-sheet'. To nouns ending in -r, -s and -z, -es is added: par -> pares 'pair',
inglês -> ingleses 'Englishman', juíz -> juízes 'judge' Change in vowel height
may also follow morphological plural marking: ovo [ovu] -> ovos [Ωvus]
'egg', avô [avo]-> avós [avΩs] 'grandfather'. In BVP, the tendency is for the
first element of the NP to be marked for plurality regardless of its
grammatical category, while the other elements remain unmarked.
Therefore, the semantic information of plurality is marked non-redundantly
in BVP. In order for this phenomenon to be regarded as the application of a
purely phonological rule, this rule would also have to delete a final -s which
is part of the root and not a plural marker: s-> ø / -##. Although this seems
to be the case in some instances (e.g. menos -> meno 'less', ônibus -> ônibu
'bus'), this rule alone does not account for all cases of lack of NPA. On the
one hand, in plural NP's at least the first element will always bear a plural
morpheme ( aqueles menino-ø 'those boys', muitas casa-ø bonita-ø 'many
nice houses') which indicates that this deletion rule is restricted to only
certain elements of the NP and does not apply across the board, as it would

26 Numerals don't receive plural marking.

27 These rules were passed into Portuguese from Latin.

 127

be expected if the rule were purely phonological; on the other hand, the
irregular plural forms mentioned above will not appear in plural NP's simply
without a final -s; instead, the unmarked form will be used ( e.g. os anel de
ouro, and not os anei-ø de ouro 'the golden rings'). Therefore, this rule is
morphological as well as phonological (cf. Guy 1981 and Holm 1987), a fact
which throws light on BVP's history (cf. chapter five), since quite possibily
it indicates that the lack of number marking in all elements of the NP is not a
simply the effect of a phonological rule dating back to archaic Portuguese
(as suggested by Naro and Scherre 1993), but instead it is more likely that it
was introduced into Brazilian Portuguese at the time of this language's
acquisition by slaves during colonial times.

As for SVA, a phonological rule seems to operate on the denasalization of

final, non-stressed syllabic segments in third person plural morphemes, e.g.
falaram [falarãu] -> [falaru] 'they spoke'. This same denasalization rule
applies to other grammatical categories, e.g. Mílton [miutõ] -> [miutu],
órgão [Ωxgãu] -> [ Ωxgu] 'organ'. This rule can be written as :

[+syll] -----> [-nasal] / ______##. [-stress]

However, the lack of SVA is also observed in third person plural and first
person plural forms, in which the third person singular unmarked form is
used, e.g. BVP: eles fala (< SBP falam) 'they speak'; BVP: nós fala (< SBP
falamos) 'we speak'.
 128

Braga (1977) and Scherre (1978) studied in detail the phonological rules
involved in NPA. Votre (1978) focused on denasalization. Guy (1981)
however, suggests that NPA and SVA can only be accounted for through a
combination of syntactic and phonological variable rules.

In that author's view, in occurences

of triple variants in plural positions of words like: vez-vezi-vezes,

ôvo- óvo-óvos, fala-falu-falam, fez-fizeru-fizeram [...] the double
rule solution we wish to adopt naturally predicts such variants. The first
member of each set results from non-application of plural marking, the
second results from application of plural marking followed by
application of one of the phonological reduction rules (S-deletion or
Denasalization), and the third variant results from plural marking followed
by nonapplication of the phonological rules. (Guy 1981:123)

4.3 Morphology

4.3.1 Noun Phrase number agreement

As observed in 4.2.2, the lack of plural marking in some morphologically

 129

complex nouns in BVP is not constrained by phonological factors only. It

seems that root changes are not part of most BVP speakers' competence.
Therefore, words ending in nasal diphthongs do not undergo any changes, as
in (61). This is also confirmed through examples of diminutive derivations
of these forms as in (62 and 63):

(61) Aque-s caminhão-ø novo-ø tudo-ø vei do Rio

those-PL truck new all came from Rio
'All those new trucks came from Rio'
(cf. SBP "Todos aqueles caminhões novos vieram do Rio")

(62) os pão-zinho
the-PL bread-DIM
'The little bread-loaves'
(cf. SBP "os pãe-zinhos")

(63) os balão-zinho
the-PL balloon-DIM
'The little balloons'
(cf.SBP "os balõe-zinhos")

The basic syntactic rule for pluralization in (61) seems to be: mark the
leftmost element in the NP. This is confirmed by Guy's (1981:197) data
 130

analysis, in which he found that in about 95% of his tokens, the first element
in the NP was the only one marked for plurality. This is also the rule that
holds for Capeverdean Creole in NP's marked for plurality (cf. alguns psoa
<P algumas pessoas 'some people').

More evidence for this rule is BVP plural-marking of interjections and

conjunctions when these occur in the leftmost position in NP's, despite these
word classes being invariable in SBP. 28

(64) Que-s gatinho-ø danado-ø

what-PL pussycat naughty
'What naughty pussycats'
(cf. SBP "Que gatinhos danados")

(65) Oh-s menino-ø!

'Hey boys!'
(cf. SBP "Oh meninos!")

Additional syntactic evidence is provided by plural number marking in

adjectives, which is determined by word order. If an adjective is the
leftmost element in a NP (ie., preposed to a noun), it will bear the plural

28Veado (1982:92) reports an example in which the preposition before a noun has a plural marker, cf."[ um
monte [dis coisa]PP]NP" 'a bunch of things' (cf. SBP "um monte de coisas").
 131

number marking; however, if it is postposed to the noun, it will not be

marked.

(66) Boas tarde-ø

good-PL afternoon
(cf. SBP "Boas tardes")

(67) Tardes boa-ø

afternoon-Pl good
(cf. SBP "Tardes boas")

Following the same syntactic rule, predicative adjectival phrases do not

take plural marking:

(68) Esses menino-ø tá grande-ø

these boy is big
'These boys are big'
(cf. SBP "Esses meninos estão grandes")

(69) Essas ferramenta-ø é sua-ø

these tool is yours-SING
'These tools are yours'
(cf. SBP "Essas ferramentas são suas")
 132

Guy (1989) observes that the tendency for the first element in the NP to be
the mark for plurality in BVP parallels the same process in Cape Verdean
Creole Portuguese, Palanquero Creole Spanish in Colombia and the Bozal
Spanish spoken in Cuba. He also notes that this fact is probably due to
substrate influence, since plural marking in Kwa and Bantu languages that
were brought to Brazil also follow this same pattern, as in the following
examples:

Holm (1988:193)
(70) Yoruba: àwon okùnrin
they man
'The men'

Holm (1988:194)
(71) Kongo: ba-ngombe
PL-cow

'cattle'

A European origin for this phenomenon has been proposed by Naro and
Scherre (1993). They suggest that the European Portuguese dialects that
were brought to Brazil already tended to delete final -s and refer to some
bibliographical sources that allegedly confirm their claim. However, neither
examples nor a description of this alleged deletion rule are provided.
According to them, this tendency was passed from Latin into Portuguese.
 133

Although this may have been true to a certain extent, it is important to note
that final -s is not deleted across the board in BVP, because, as pointed out
above, plurality is marked in the first element of the NP through the
presence of final -s. 29 Furthermore, if this deletion was in fact ever present in
EP, for reasons that the authors do not discuss, it has been eliminated
because deletion of word final -s is not present in today's EP.

4.3.2 Noun Phrase gender agreement

Noun phrase gender agreement is present in almost all rural and urban
dialects of BVP. Yet, it is worth mentioning that there are a few dialects
which are exceptions to this rule. The relevance of this fact lies in the fact
that these dialects might well be representative of earlier stages of BVP,
indicating a larger morphosyntactic restructuring than commonly found in
the language today.

The best well known exception to Noun Phrase gender agreement is found in
the dialect of Helvécia, in which variable gender agreement has been
reported by Baxter et al. (1994). In that article, the authors observe that the

29 Schwegler (p.c.) points out that in Chota Spanish (in highland Ecuador) the unmarked nucleus of a plural
NP also cannot be accounted for through final -s deletion, since there are occurrences such as los pastel-ø
'the-PL pastry'. For -s deletion to have taken place, the resulting form should have been * los pastele (cf.
Standard Spanish 'los pasteles').
 134

agreement rule applies with a frequency of 95% and it is in its final stages
of acquisition by the population of Helvécia.

As can be seen in the table below, the older population is the one which uses
the agreement rule least:

TABLE 6
Agreement rule in the dialect of Helvécia

Age group frequency probability

20 to 40 98% .72
41 to 60 96% .56
60+ 89% .23
Adapted from Baxter (forthcoming)

The lack of NP gender agreement can also be observed in folk songs, such as
the Reisado from the state of Pernambuco mentioned in chapter three. In it
there are six examples of lack of NP gender agreement, which are:

(72) esse gente (< P essa gente)

this-MAS people-FEM
 135

'these people'

(73) meu banda (< P minha banda)

my-MAS band-FEM
'my side'

(74) no cavalo- marinha (< P no cavalo-marinho)

in-the-MAS horse-MAS marine-FEM
'sea horse'

(75) desse casa (< P dessa casa)

of-this-MAS house-FEM
'from this house'

(76) esse viola (< P essa viola)

this-MAS guitar-FEM
'this guitar'

(77) minha boio (< P meu boi)

my-FEM bull-MAS
'my bull'

In Machado (1943), which is a study of what the author called 'a creole
 136

dialect in São João da Chapada' in the state of Minas Gerais, 30 there are
several instances of lack of gender agreement in the songs sung by slaves.
Among them I found mia cavalo (< P meu cavalo) 'my horse', mia pai (< P
meu pai) 'my father', tanto aua (< P tanta água) 'so much water' and no
cacunda (< BVP na cacunda) 'on the back'.

The lack of NP gender agreement has also been reported in studies such as
Vogt and Fry (1985), Baiocchi (1991) and Careno (1992), all of which
focused on Afro-Brazilian Portuguese. The Caipira dialect (which is not an
exclusively Afro-Brazilian Portuguese dialect since it is spoken by whites
and people of mixed ancestry besides blacks in rural areas) studied by
Amaral (1920) and Rodrigues (1974) also has lack of gender agreement.
Lack of grammatical gender is also a common feature in West African and
the Portuguese-based creoles (cf. Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese um valsa
<P "uma valsa" literally 'a-FEM waltz-FEM' and nha coraçon < P "meu
coração" literally 'my-MASC heart-MASC').

4.3.3 Subject-verb agreement

The extent to which SVA patterns differ in BVP and SBP seems to be
related to sociolects. While in rural areas there may be only two

30 By the term 'creole' the author referred to the mixed African-Portuguese language spoken by slaves.
 137

differentiated verbal inflections (1st person singular and a general form

coinciding with the standard 3rd person singular), the verbal paradigm in
urban BVP is closer to that of the standard language, although it has forms
that are unmarked or phonologically reduced (see 4.2.2) in comparison to
those of the standard. The paradigms corresponding to the vernacular and
standard versions of the present of the verb comprar 'to buy' are given
below:

(78)
BVP SBP
1sg. eu compro compro
2sg. tu ø / compra compras
você compra compra
3sg. ele/ela compra compra
1pl. nós compra/compramu compramos
a gente compra 31 ø
2pl. vós ø compráis 32
vocês compra/compr˜u compram
31The original 1 pl. pronoun nós has progressively been replaced by the form a gente literally 'the people'
which takes the verb form identical to 3 sg. (e.g., a gente compra leite 'we buy milk'). Schwegler (p.c.) has
pointed out that in Palenquero the pronoun hende 'we' is likely to have been a creole feature, therefore
suggesting that the BVP pronoun a gente may likewise be linked to a creole origin.

32 The EP forms for 2nd person sg. and pl. pronouns (tu and vós respectively) along with their
corresponding verb forms are rare in Brazil. Even when used, the 2nd person sg. pronoun form (tu) is
usually followed by a 3rd person verb inflection. The 2nd person pl. pronou (vós) with its correspondenting
verb form is only used in religious or official ceremonies.
 138

3pl. eles/elas compra/compr˜u compram

Another factor which plays an important role in the reduction of inflexions

in BVP verb forms is related to the saliency effect. The more irregular the
verb forms, the less likely it is for the simplification of the verb paradigm to
occur. In other words, irregular verbs such as ser 'to be' will more likely
have more forms used by speakers of BVP than verbs such as falar 'to
speak', which is highly regular and preserves its stem in all its forms.
Therefore, especially in urban dialects, it is unlikely for speakers to say nós é
feio 'we are ugly'; instead they will probably say nós somu feio, in which
case, somu (< P somos) simply loses its final -s.

In addition to the paradigms presented above in (78), there is another

possibility for the configuration of SVA in a specific variety of BVP. That
is found in the Helvécia dialect, as has been shown in Baxter (forthcoming).
In that dialect, there is only one verbal form for all persons in the present
and preterit paradigms. The complete present paradigm for the verb
comprar 'to buy' in Helvécia dialect would thus be as in (79) below:

(79) Helvécia Dialect BVP SBP

1 sg. compra/compro compro compro

2 sg. compra compra compras/compra
3 sg. compra compra compra
 139

1 pl. compra/compramu compra/compramu compramos

2 pl. compra/compr˜u compra/compr˜u comprais/
compram
3 pl. compra/compr˜u compra/compr˜u compram

As can be seen in (79) above, the present indicative verbal paradigm of

comprar 'to buy' differs minimaly in the Helvécia dialect and BVP; this fact
is likely to indicate that earlier stages of BVP may have been more
restructured, therefore resembling the Helvécia dialect more closely.

The tendency to use only one verbal form for all persons is especially strong
in the older population of Helvécia (cf. Baxter forthcoming), since the
younger population usually has more opportunities to be exposed to formal
education as well as to live outside of their community in contact with other
BVP dialects.

The morphological simplification of the verbal paradigm to only one form in

a given tense has also been attested in Afro-Brazilian folk songs known as
Jongo (Ribeiro 1968). This points to existence of other dialects besides the
Helvecian in which such drastic morphological simplification occured. An
example is given below:

(80)
 140

Eu pegô minha boiada

I take-pret-3sg my herd
'I took my herd

e botô no cariandô
and put-pret-3sg on(-the) droving trail
and I put it on the droving trail'

(from Baxter forthcoming, an excerpt from a jongo from Cachoeira Paulista,

state of São Paulo).

The same phenomenon has been observed by researchers of the Creolization

vestiges in isolated Afro-Brazilian dialects project (Federal University of
Bahia / Salvador/ Brazil) in a folk song from the town of Calunga (state of
Goiás) and in the dialect of Arraiais de Rio de Contas (state of Bahia), as
reported in Baxter (forthcoming).

There are also several examples of a single verb form for all subjects in
Jeroslow (1974) describing a rural dialect in the northeastern state of Ceará.
The lack of a distinct first person singular verb form is usually found in the
present indicative tense, as in (81) and (82) below, but not always (83):

Jeroslow (1974:171)
(81) Eu sabe fazê isso
 141

I know-3sg do this
'I know how to do this'
(cf. SBP "Eu sei fazer isso")

(ibid.:171)
(82) Eu dá um jeito
I give-3sg a way
'I'll take care of it"
(cf. SBP "Eu dou um jeito")
(ibid.:142)

(83) Eu fui mi pegé

I went-1sg myself attached-1sg
'I went, attached myself'
(cf. SBP "Eu então peguei-me")

In the slave songs reported by Machado (1943), there are occurences of the
first person pronoun being followed by a third person singular verb form as
in eu memo é (< P eu mesmo sou) 'I myself am'.

From my own data I have observed that small children acquiring Brazilian
Portuguese in a monolingual environment use this same morphological
simplification of only one verb form for each tense. The reason for this
seems to be the high frequency of the third person singular form in adult
 142

speech, which provides the model for child speech. In other words, this
occurs as a generalization in child speech, in much the same way as English
speaking children at one point will generalize plural rules for irregular plural
forms and will add -s to form irregular plural forms (eg. foots) as well as -ed
to verbs as a general rule for the past tense (eg. singed) [cf. Fromkin and
Rodman (1993:407)].

My observation is corrobarated by Simões and Stoel-Gammon (1979), who

observed that children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese as their first language
used the third person singular of the present form with any subject,
regardless of person or number. It was not until a later stage in the language
acquisition process, that the children learned the first person singular form.

This first language acquisition data is relevant because it points towards

what might have been the incomplete acquisition of Portuguese by slaves in
Brazil. Because slaves on large farms in colonial Brazil had so little
exposure to Portuguese as used among native speakers, it is likely that their
acquisition of Portuguese was hindered and in some aspects never went
beyond the first stages of acquisiton observed in speakers in a normal
language transmission. These idiosyncratic features in the varieties of
Portuguese spoken by the slaves in Brazil might have crystallized in their
speech and remained in the speech of their descendents before there was
more contact with the broader Portuguese-speaking community in Brazil.
 143

The explanation for the presence of reduced verbal paradigms in some

specific dialects of Brazilian Portuguese presented above is not mutually
exclusive with other possible accounts for the same phenomena. A single
verbal form is also consistent with the previous existence of pidgin and
creole languages in colonial Brazil. It is highly likely that on plantations, for
example, the communication code for interaction not only among slaves but
between whites and slaves as well was a Portuguese-based pidgin, at least in
the early period of Brazil's colonization. This pidgin probably had only one
verbal form, which in all likelihood was based either on the Portuguese
infinitive or the third person singular.

A parallel phenomenon is found in the Tonga Portuguese spoken by

descendents of indentured workers from Angola and Mozambique on the
African island of São Tomé. Rougé (1992:174) provides the following
examples, in which personal endings on verb forms are absent, replaced by a
neutral form based on the third person singular Portuguese form:

(84) yô skisi ( P eu esqueço) 'I forget', yô skiseu (< P eu esqueci) 'I forgot'

(85) Tempu ki nôsu nasêu (< P no tempo em que nós nascemos) 'when
we were born'

(86) Kiriapanga, nôsu dansava êli (< P nós dançávamos a Kiriapanga)

'we used to dance the Kiriapanga'
 144

(87) Ezi matava zenti (< P Eles matavam a gente) 'they used to kill
people'

Lorenzino (1994:111) reporting on the verb phrase in nonstandard

Sãotomense Portuguese gives the following examples in which the first
person singular subject is followed by a third person singular verb form: eu
nõ é mesti ( < P eu não sou mestre) 'I'm not a teacher' and eu nõ sabe jogar
(P eu não sei jogar) 'I don't know how to play'. These forms, like the ones
provided by Rougé (1992), closely parallel the monoverbal form found in
some restructured Brazilian Portuguese dialects (cf. Helvécia dialect),
pointing towards, possible pidginization/creolization, language contact and
second language acquisition phenomena as their common source.

4.3.4 Verb tenses

Azevedo (1989) discusses the reduction of verb tenses in BVP as compared

to SBP. According to him 'the limited occurrence of most of those (SBP)
tenses in spontaneous speech indicates a trend toward simplification' (ibid.
866). BVP makes use primarily of the indicative mood of the present,
preterit and imperfect tenses. The use of subjunctive and inflected infinitive
forms is almost non-existent in informal speech. Futurity is expressed
through the present form or a combination of ir 'to go' + infinitive. The
 145

imperfect replaces the conditional. Some examples from Azevedo

(1989:866) are the following:

Non-inflected infinitive:
(88) É só vocês querer
'If only you want [it]'
(cf. SBP "É só vocês quererem")

Present indicative for present subjunctive:

(89) Eu quero que vocês vem lá em casa amanhã
'I want you to come to my place tomorrow'
(cf. SBP "Eu quero que vocês venham lá em casa amanhã")

Imperfect indicative for preterit subjunctive:

(90) Se eu tinha tempo então eu ia
'If I had time then I would go'
(cf. SBP "Se eu tivesse tempo então eu iria")

Amaral (1920 [1976:73]) describes the same type of phenomena,

emphasizing the common use of forms of the present to indicate futurity as
in eu vô instead of eu irei 'I will go' and nóis fazemo instead of nós faremos
'we will do (it)'. However, this use of present forms to indicate the future are
also used in SBP. Similarly, the conditional is expressed through imperfect
preterit forms as in eu dizia instead of eu diria 'I would say' and ele era
 146

capáiz instead of ele seria capaz 'he would be able to'. Here, again, these
forms are used by SBP, and even EP speakers.

Both Ferreira (1985) and later Baxter (in press) present convincing evidence
that the verbal system of the Helvécia dialect still maintains formal
structures resembling those of creole languages, at least among older
speakers. That is shown in the following examples from Baxter (idem):

Past indicated through a present form:

(91) Eu tá trabalhando, aí eu lembrei... 33
I be-pres.-3sg working then I remembered
'I was working, then I remembered...'
(cf. SBP "Eu estava trabalhando, aí eu lembrei")

(92) Eu pega Mário e mandou ele cortá

I grab-pres.-3sg Mário and asked him cut-inf.
'I grabbed Mário and asked him to cut...'
(cf. SBP "Eu peguei Mário e o mandei cortar)

Infinitive form conveying tense:

33 John Holm (p.c.) points out that "judging from other Portuguese-based creoles, tá is more likely to be a
progressive marker than a present tense marker". However, the verbal form tá trabalhando in example
(91) in Baxter's (in press) analysis is listed as being based on the SBP present continuous form está
trabalhando 'is working'. A more conclusive analysis of this form would more likely be achieved if it were
done taking into account the context in which it occurred, rather than as an isolated form. The same
rationale certainly is applicable to the other examples in section 4.3.4 as well.
 147

(93) Como inda no Mutum mesmo onde eu morá

like still in-the Mutum itself where I live-inf.
'Still like in Mutum (itself) where I used to live'
(cf.SBP "Como ainda em Mutum mesmo, onde eu morava")

Finite form conveying infinitival meaning:

(94) Nõ sê vai lá
Neg know-pres.-1sg. go-pres-3sg. there
'I don't know how to go there'
(cf.SBP "Não sei ir lá")

In Jeroslow (1974), a study of a rural dialect in the state of Ceará, there are
several instances of tense simplification which resemble the phenomena
observed in the Helvécia dialect, as shown below:

Subjunctive forms based on indicative forms:

(Jeroslow 1974:92)

(95) /n˜u kreu ki ve/

NEG believe that sees
'I don't believe he sees'
(cf. SBP "Não creio que veja)

Infinitive form conveying tense:

 148

(Jeroslow 1974:133)

(96) eu barré a casa, limpá a casa pa recebé ela

I sweep-inf the house clean-inf the house to welcome her
'I swept the house, cleaned the house to welcome her'
(cf. SBP "Eu varri a casa, limpei a casa para recebê-la")

As can be seen from the above, several of the tense patterns in BVP dialects
do not correspond to EP, which suggests that they may have resulted from
innovations in BVP as a response to language contact. It is also important to
note that the phenomena exemplified in (88)-(90) resemble those found in
some Portuguese-based creole languages in which verb forms seem to be
based on the third person singular of the present tense of the indicative
mood.

4.3.5 Pronouns: case marking

In BVP the same personal pronoun forms usually have both subject and
object functions in the sentence. While in modern EP object pronouns are
always clitic forms, in BP, even in more standard-like lects, these are very
rare, as seen below:
(97) Deixa eu lá e pega ela
leave I there and get she
 149

'Drop me off there and pick her up'

(cf. SBP "Deixe-me lá e a pegue")

Azevedo (1989:864)
(98) Foi ele que entregou nós.
was he that informed we
'It was he who informed on us'
(cf. SBP "Foi ele que nos entregou")

The pronominal forms in BVP have some morphological variants, such as:

1 SG: eu ~ yô ~ ô 'I'
2 SG: você (-s) ~ vacê (-s) ~ vancê (-s) ~ vossuncê (-s) ~ mecê (-
s) ~ ocê (-s) ~ cê (-s) 'you'
1 PL: nós ~ a gente 'we'
3 PL: eles ~ ez ~ êzi 'they-masc'
elas ~ Ez ~ Eza 'they-fem'

Some of these forms have parallels in Tonga Portuguese, such as yô (< P

eu) 'I', ôsê (< P você) 'you-sing', ôsês (< P vocês) 'you-pl', ezi (< P eles, elas)
'they' [cf. Rougé (1992)].

Amaral (1920 [1976:73]) reports that in the speech of blacks the third person
singular pronoun form ele is invariant and used for both masculine and
 150

feminine as opposed to standard Portuguese which distinguishes between ele

'he' and ela 'she'. He also points out that the third person plural pronoun is
achieved through preposing the definite plural article os 'the-pl' to the third
person singular pronoun ele 'he, she' as in osêle fôro zimbora (< P eles
[elas] foram-se embora) 'they went away' (cf. section 4.3.1 for number
agreement in BVP and 4.3.6 for morpheme boundary changes).

In both Cape Verdean and São Tomense, just like many West African
languages, the personal pronouns generally lack case and gender marking as
can be seen below:

(99) Cape Verdean

Subject Pronouns Object Pronouns
Person Number
1 singular N, mi mi, m
2 singular bo, bosê b, bo, bosê
3 singular el ei, 'l
1 plural no n, nos
2 plural bzot, bosês bzot, bosês
3 plural ês ês
Veiga (1984:80)

(110) São Tomense

Subject PronounsObject Pronouns
 151

Person Number
1 singular N, î, ami mu, ami
2 singular bo bo
3 singular e, ele e
1 plural nõ nõ
2 plural inãse, nãse nãse
3 plural ine, ne ine, ne
Ferraz (1979:62)

However, it is important to note that in sixteenth century Portuguese

literature there are some instances of personal pronouns unmarked for case
in object position (cf. Bueno 1955:210-12); however, these might have been
used for emphatic purposes only, similarly to emphatic object forms found
in French:

(101) desqui vi ela [Cancioneiro da Vaticana ]

since-that saw-1sg she
'Since I saw her'
(cf. SBP "Desde que a vi")

[Fernão Lopes, Crônica de Dom Fernando, Chapter 46]

(102) e levaram ele a Mateus Fernandes de Sevilha
and took-3pl he to Mateus Fernandes de Sevilha
 152

'And they took him to Mateus Fernandes de Sevilha'

(cf. SBP "...e levaram-no a Mateus Fernandes de Sevilha")

Examples (101) and (102) may indicate that the non-marking of object
pronouns in present day BVP is a feature inherited from the Portuguese
dialects spoken by early colonizers. This feature may have been reinforced
through language transfer phenomena as speakers of African languages
learned Portuguese as a second language in Brazil (cf. chapter five).

4.3.6 Word formation processes

There are some word formation processes found in BVP which have
parallels in SBP. Among these, reduplication is a salient example. It has
been noted by Baxter (1987) and Holm (1992) that this process is typical of
the Atlantic creoles and their African substrates, which suggests that it might
have been incorporated into BVP through substrate interference.

In BVP there are occurences of reduplication of adjectives, adverbs and

verbs. Reduplicated adjectives convey intensity or emphasis as in as menina
é linda, linda 'the girls are very beautiful'. The same meaning is conveyed
by reduplicated adverbs, as in João mora longe, longe 'João lives very far
away'. Verbal reduplication may convey intensity as in Doca tava chorano,
chorano 'Doca cried a lot'.
 153

Change in morpheme boundaries gave origin to words such as simbora

'away' (Amaral 1920 [1976:73]), which must have been formed by the
reinterpretation of morpheme boundary between the reflexive pronoun se
'self-3rd person' and embora 'away' (cf. ele foi-se embora 'he went away').
In BVP simbora is perceived as a word, as in eu vou simbora daqui 'I'm
leaving here' or in simbora gente 'let's go'.

Reinterpretation of morpheme boundary is found also in the combination of

definite articles followed by nouns (Amaral 1920 [1976:71]) as in zóio 'eye'
(< P os olhos 'the eyes'), zoreia 'ear' (< P as orelhas 'the ears') in which the
noun phrase constituents boundary is reanalysed and the plural morpheme in
the article is perceived as the first phoneme in a noun starting with a
consonant. This same feature is found in several creole languages including
the Portuguese-based creoles [cf. ST zonda 'wave' (< P as ondas 'the
waves') (Holm 1988:97)], Haitian creole French [cf. zãmi 'friend' (< F les
amis 'the friends'), zorèi 'ear' (< F les orelles 'the ears')] and Caribbean
Spanish [cf. suña 'nail' (< S las uñas 'the nails')]; a fact that suggests that not
enough exposure to Portuguese was provided to its second-language
learners, which in all probability led to morpheme boundary
reinterpretations.

4.4 Syntax
 154

There are a number of BVP syntactic constructions that indicate that this
language followed its own path of development, undergoing processes that
set it apart from EP. The structure of relative clauses, the use of overt
subject pronouns as an effect of reduced verbal paradigms, double predicate
negation, certain aspects of word order in interrogative clauses and passive
voice strategies are among the most striking differences between BVP and
present-day vernacular varieties of EP. Furthermore, most of these features
are also shared by the Portuguese-based creoles and varieties of Portuguese
spoken as a second language in Africa. 34 In the following section, these
Brazilian syntactic features are described and examined.

4.4.1 Verb Phrase

4.4.1.1 Serial verbs

One of the most interesting features of BVP is the presence of strings of

finite verbs resembling serial verb constructions, which are common in both
the Atlanctic creoles and Kwa languagues. Serial verbs are 'a series of two
(or more) verbs; they both have the same subject and are not joined by a
conjuction ('and') or a complementizer ('to') as they would be in European
languages', according to Holm (1988:183). In BVP there are basically two

34 Most of these are also features of Caribbean Spanish.

 155

types of serial verbs: the first consists of a string of verbs with related
meanings; the second, however, is less transparent and consists of inflected
forms of the verb ir 'go', pegar 'take', chegar 'to arrive' and virar 'to turn'
followed by another inflected verb.

A string of verbs with related meanings seems to indicate a chronological

sequence of events. This type of construction is very similar to those found
in some West African languages. According to Lord (1993:2) in these
languages

verb phrases in an unmarked sequence all refer to subparts or aspects

of a single overall event. The action or state denoted by the second
(or non-initial) verb phrase is an outgrowth of the action denoted by
the first verb phrase; the following verb phrase represents a further
development, a consequence, result, goal, or culmination of the
action named by the previous verb.

An example of such a construction in BVP is (103):

Jeroslow (1974:126)
(103) Ela olhô viu os home
she looked saw the men
'She looked, she saw the men'
 156

(cf. SBP "Ela olhou e viu os homens")

The second type of verb string was analysed in Jeroslow (1974) as

consisting of an aspectual marker plus a verb, since the first verb in these
sequences have lost their original lexical content. That author claims that
the first verb in the string conveys completive aspect. Holm (1992)
suggested that instead of aspectual markers, these constructions might have
been derived from tense markers and arrived at their current form through
decreolization.

Although diachronically these constructions may have been derived from

aspect or tense markers, in my research I found no evidence that they bear
such meaning synchronically. The data I analysed seem to indicate that all
tokens occurred within a narrative and never as part of a description or
argumentation. The first verb in the sequence has the function of a discourse
marker, very similar to an adverb, connecting a sequence of events which
occur in a definite order. I found that in the overwhelming majority of
cases, the first verb carries the meaning of '(and) then'. In my own view,
then, these words, despite their verbal form, are really not full verbs given
the restrictions in their morphosyntactic behavior: they only occur in the
present, imperfect and perfect tenses and they cannot be subjected to
 157

negation, as can be observed in the examples below: 35

(104) Present tense: Jeroslow (1974:128)

ele pergunta onde ela tá, ela vai diz 36 ta
he asks where she is, she goes says is

no barrigo do Manel
in-the belly of-the Manel

'He asks where it is; she goes, says it is in the stomach of Manuel'
(cf. SBP "Ele pergunta onde ela está, aí ela diz que está na
barriga do Manuel")

(105) Imperfect tense: Jeroslow (1974:129)

Um mês ou com dois, marcava o tempo
a month or with two set the time

o sujeito ia buscava o dinhero

35 These observations fit the description of main verbs that have become secondarily grammaticalized to
aspectual markers, as in many languages, including all creole languages, typically go, come, arrive,
(re)turn, stay or stand, and sit.

36 Cf. *ela num vai diz

she NEG goes says
'She doesn't go say'
 158

the fellow went got the money

'[After] a month or two, they would set a date [when] the fellow
would go,would get the money'
(cf. SBP "Depois de um ou dois meses, marcava-se uma data,
aí então o sujeito buscava o dinheiro")

(106) Perfect tense: Jeroslow (1974:130)

"Vá trocá de roupa mia fia".
go change of clothes my daughter

Ela foi trocô de roupa

she went changed of clothes

aí foi dançá
then went dancing

'- "Go change your clothing, my child".

She went, changed her clothing. Then she went off to dance'
(cf. BVP " - "Vá trocar-se minha filha".
Ela então trocou de roupa e foi dançar")

(107) Quando eu cabei de rezá

 159

when I finished of pray

peguei chamei o menino e fomo embora

took called the boy and went away

'And then when I finished praying, I called the boy and went
away'

(cf. SBP "Aí, quando acabei de rezar, chamei o menino e

fomos embora")

4.4.1.2 Existential 'ter'

The use of the verb ter 'to have' in BP with an existential meaning has been
noted since Coelho (1880-1886) as a feature that links it to Portuguese-based
creoles [and to creole languages in general, for that matter; cf. English creole
abi and gat, French creole g˜eye (Ed Bendix p.c.)]. The standard languages
both in Brazil and Portugal require the use of verb haver 'there is/are' to
convey existential meanings. However, there is evidence that points to
archaic Portuguese for one of the possible origins of this feature of BP, 37
which may have been reinforced by factors such as language contact and

37 Haver itself comes from Latin habere 'to have'.

 160

processes of second-language acquisition in Brazil. It is interesting to note

that the verb ter when used in existential constructions only occurs with the
3sg. morphology, as is the case with the verb haver. Some examples are
provided below:

[João de Barros,Clarimundo II-9]

(108) AP: e lá dentro tinha muitos jardins
and there inside had many gardens
'There were several gardens inside'
(cf. SBP "e lá dentro havia muitos jardins")

(109) BVP: Tem muitas casa ali

have many house there
'There are many houses there'
(cf. SBP "Há muitas casa ali")

Silva (1985:185)
(110) CV: Tene-ba un home sintado la
have-ANT a man seated there
'There was a man sitting there'
(cf. SBP "Havia um homem sentado lá")
 161

Peck (1988:36)
(111) GB: Tem um minjer ki tem um fiju-femea
have a woman that have a child-female
'There is a woman who has a daughter'
(cf. SBP "Há uma mulher que tem uma filha")

4.4.1.3 Predicate negation

Double predicate negation is common in BP and is used by speakers of both

non-standard and standard lects. Its occurrence, however, may be governed
by discourse factors, and be restricted to contexts in which a presupposition
about the event/action in focus is not confirmed (Schwegler 1991).
Historically, Portuguese has always had single preverbal negation. However,
double sentential negation is used in European Portuguese to convey
emphasis (cf. Holm 1992:57). 38 But, as pointed out by Schwegler (1991)
despite this being true, the use of double negation in EP is highly restricted

38 I have found the following passage from a sixteenth century play by Gil Vicente, which presents an
example of double negation:

Esse serão glorioso

Não he de justiça, não.
(Anto da Barca do Purgatório) in Amaral (1976:80).

However, Schwegler (p.c.) points out that 'without further context, it is impossible to decide if this
[construction] is indeed double negation', an observation that I fully support, given that there is literaly no
other similar example in archaic Portuguese that I have found in all the data analysed for this dissertation.
 162

(Schwegler (p.c.) notes that it is only used in short answers to direct

questions in EP).

Besides double negation, BVP also has single postverbal negation, which is
pragmatically similar to double negation, since it also conveys the idea of
contradicting a previous assumption. Therefore, BVP has three negation
patterns, as exemplified below:

(112) Preverbal negation:

Lau não/num viu a menina 39

Lau NEG saw the girl
'Lau didn't see the girl'

(113) Double negation:

Lau não/num viu a menina não

Lau NEG saw the girl NEG

'Lau didn't see the girl'

39 Num [n~u] is apparently a vernacular variant of não [nã~w].

 163

(114) Postverbal negation:

Lau viu a menina não

Lau saw the girl NEG

'Lau didn't see the girl'

Double negation is also variably found in Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese

(ka...nãw) and is required in São Tomense Creole Portuguese (na...fa ~
na...fo), Angolar Creole Portuguese (na...wa) and Annobonese Creole
Portuguese (na...f):

(115) CV: Cardoso (1989:68)

N ka tem nãw
I NEG have NEG
'No, I don't have (any)'

(116) ST: Ferraz (1979:68)

A na kuvi'da nõ fa
UNM NEG invite us NEG

'We weren't invited'

The creole of Principe (PR) has only postverbal negation in which the
 164

negation particle is fa::

(117) PR: Ferraz (1979:11)

zwã se'be lan'da fa
John know swim NEG

'John does not know how to swim'

The substratal sources for double and postverbal negation in the Gulf of
Guinea creoles are discussed in Ferraz (1979:11), pointing out possible
Western Bantu languages as a source for these features [cf. Kikongo: ke...ko:
ke + besumba +ko 'they do not buy (Lipski 1994:40)]. Holm (1992:57)
mentions that discontinuous double negation is found in Ewe, a Kwa
language. It should be noted that a great number of speakers of both Kwa
and Western Bantu languages were brought to Brazil as slaves in colonial
times.

A close parallel to negation patterns in BVP is found in nonstandard

Caribbean Spanish (eg. in the Dominican Republic, Chota Spanish in the
Ecuadorian Highlands)) and Palenquero (a Spanish-based creole spoken in
Colombia). 40 Palenquero has both variable discontinuous double negation
and single postverbal negation, while Dominican vernacular Spanish has

40Schwegler (forthcoming a and c) suggests that the double negation pattern in vernacular Caribbean
Spanish, BVP as well as in Chota Spanish is an attestation of an Afro-Portuguese code being brought to the
Americas by boçal slaves born in Africa during colonial times.
 165

double negation in addition to the standard simple preverbal negation:

Palenquero: Schwegler (forthcoming b)

(118) E kelé fruta nu
he wants fruit NEG

(119) E nu kelé fruta nu

he NEG wants fruit NEG

(120) E nu kelé fruta

he NEG wants fruta
'He doesn't want fruit'

Dominican vernacular Spanish: Schwegler (forthcoming a)

(121) Yo no estoy llegando tarde no!
I NEG am arriving late NEG

'I am not arriving late!'

It has been pointed out that double negation also occurs in the vernacular
Portuguese spoken in Angola [Linguagem dos Mussegues or speech of the
working class neighborhoods (Lipski1994:48): ... não volta mais não '...(he)
will not come back'] (cf. also Schwegler forthcoming a) and São Tomé (cf.
Nõ gosto muito não 'I don't like it very much' [Lorenzino 1994:112]).
Additionally, Schwegler (forthcoming a) points out that double predicate
 166

negation also occurs in the Cuban Bozal Spanish (cf. Yo no so pobre no "I'm
not poor).

In BVP negation can also be conveyed through the addition of nada

'nothing' to sentence final position:

(122) Eu falei isso nada

I said this nothing
'I didn't say that'

Nada , literally 'nothing', can also appear in sentential double negation as the
rightmost negator. The meaning of this type of structure parallels that of the
num/não...não structure discussed above:

(123) Maria num vei' nada

Maria NEG come NEG

'Maria didn't come at all'

Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese also has a negation structure parallel to the
one in (123):

CV: Cardoso (1989:68)

 167

(124) N ka ta fka nada

I NEG HAB stay NEG
'I'm not staying'

Yet another way of expressing negation in BVP is through the use of the
particle lá in certain interrogative structures, such as:

(125) e eu lá como arroz?

and I lá eat rice
'I don't eat rice' (Don't you know I don't eat rice?)

(126) Eu sei lá quem morreu?

I know lá who died
'I don't know who died' (Why shoud I know who died?)

From the evidence presented through the Portuguese-based creoles of West

Africa, it is likely that the negation patterns in BVP were influenced by
those in African and creole languages. Their incorporation into BVP may
have resulted from transfer from the African slaves' first languages, possibly
via a pidgin Portuguese (cf. Schwegler forthcoming c for the same
conclusion about the Spanish vernaculars of South America and the
Caribbean).
 168

4.4.1.4 Reflexivization and quasi passivization

In standard Portuguese reflexive clitics indicating person and number are

used with certain verbs to indicate actions considered reflexive. However,
this is not the only possible use of these pronouns. The use of the third-
person reflexive pronoun se may indicate quasi passive constructions. In
BVP neither of these uses are common. In (127) either a subject personal
pronoun [with the support of mesmo 'self' to disambiguate the reflexive
meaning when context alone is not effective) or zero pronominal anaphora
substitute the reflexive pronoun (the latter seems to be an avoidance
startegy, through which the stigmatized use of a subject personal pronoun is
avoided): 41

(127) João cortou ø / ele (mesmo) com faca

João cut ø / he self with knife
'João cut himself with a knife'
(cf. SBP "João cortou-se com faca")

Other constructions with a reflexive meaning replace the reflexive pronoun

with a subject pronoun:

41Schwegler (p.c.) reports a similar use of personal pronouns followed by mimo 'self' in Palenquero to
express reflexive actions.
 169

(128) Maria só fala dela (mesma)

Maria only talks of-she self
'Maria only talks about herself'
(cf. SBP "Maria só fala de si")

In the Portuguese-based creoles of Africa there is no reflexivization,

therefore there are no reflexive pronouns. As pointed out by Ferraz
(1979:72) in ST, ambiguity may result from the lack of reflexivization as in
e pl'de 'he lost' or 'he got lost'.

Lorenzino (1994:112) points out that the lack of reflexive pronouns is also a
feature of nonstandard Sãotomense Portuguese, giving the following
examples: como chama compadre? (P como se chama) 'what's your name?'
and perde no mar (P perde-se...) 'It got lost at sea'.

Instead of quasi passive, what is found in BVP are active constructions with
a subject with an indeterminate reference as in (129):

(129) Eles /o povo / os outro fala muito e faz pouco aqui

they /the people/ the others say much and do little here
'Much is said and little is done here'
(cf. SBP "Fala-se muito e faz-se pouco aqui")
 170

This same strategy for conveying passive meaning without the use of
reflexive construction are also found in archaic Portuguese as well as the
Portuguese-based creoles of Africa, as shown below. 42 This indicates that
the origin of such structures may have been both the Portuguese dialects and
African creoles brought to America. 43

Archaic Portuguese [Antônio Prestes, Autos (sixteenth century)]:

(130) Quanto homem vive, vê mais
how much man lives see more
'The more one lives, the more one sees'
(cf. SBP "Quanto mais se vive, mais se vê)

CV: Silva (1957:184)

(131) Nakel casa ez ta vende fazenda
In-that house they HAB sell fabric
'Fabric is sold in that house'
(cf. SBP "Vende-se fazenda naquela casa)

42This type of construction has been traced back to Latin, therefore identifying it as a tendency in
Romance languages (cf. Bueno 1955:207-8).

43 This is also found in Bantu languages, and some can even add an agent phrase.
 171

GB : Peck (1988:148)
(132) Jintis ta fala Kriol li
people HAB speak Kriol there
'Kriol is spoken there'
(cf. SBP: Fala-se Kriol ali)

ST: Ferraz (1979:66)

(133) A bele ni pΩtΩ 44
UNM see-he at door
He was seen at the door'
(cf. SBP "Ele foi visto à porta")

4.4.2 Noun Phrase

4.4.2.1 Definite reference

Nouns with a definite reference in BVP may appear variably without a

preposed definite article. The semantics of these constructions have not
been studied; however, Veado (1982:37) suggests that their use is random.
Some examples of sentences without definite articles are provided below:

44 The pronoun a is unmarked for person and number and only occurs as a preverbal subject. It can be
tranlated into English as meaning "one" in a sentence such as 'one never knows...'. According to Ferraz
(1979:66), a is of Kwa origin.
 172

BVP (from the state of Minas Gerais): Veado (1982:37)

(134) ø Marido num tá em casa
husband NEG is at home
'The husband isn't home'
(cf. SBP "O marido não está em casa")

Helvécia dialect: Ferreira (1985:30)

(135) Quando abri ø janela
when I-opened window
'When I opened the window'
(cf. SBP "Quando abri a janela")

Ceará rural BVP: Jeroslow (1974:133)

(136) ø Pessoa vê as coisa...
person sees the things
'The person sees the things...'
(cf. SBP "A pessoa vê as coisas...")

The lack of definite article in NP's with a definite reference is also a feature
of the Portuguese-based Atlantic creoles, as exemplified below:
 173

ST: Ferraz (1979:66)

(137) ø 'anka mo'de m˜u
crab bite me
'The crab bit me'

CV: Cardoso (1989:23)

(138) Bo ta faze ø izarsísj
you HAB do exercise
'You are doing the exercise'

GB: Peck (1988:282)

(139) riba di ø tera bas di ø seu
above of earth below of sky
'Above the earth beneath the skies'

This same feature is also variably present in Angolan Portuguese and

Sãotomense Portuguese:

Angolan Portuguese: Mendes (1985:133)

(140) não sei ø causa da doença
NEG I-know cause of-the disease
'I don't know the cause of the disease'
 174

Sãotomense Portuguese: Lorenzino (1994:112)

(141) ø nome do branco é Tirifán
name of-the white is Tirifán
'The white man's name is Tirifán'

Baxter (forthcoming) hypothesizes that the lack of definite articles in

Helvécia Portuguese can be attributed to irregular transmission of
Portuguese. He bases his claim in the presence of this same feature in the
Portuguese-based Atlanctic creoles and in the Portuguese spoken as a second
language in Angola.

4.4.2.2 Overt subject pronoun

Another feature of BVP is the increasingly obligatory filling of subject

positions. This results from the reduction of verbal morphology and the
need for overt pronouns to disambiguate person (see 4.3.3). While SBP has
been considered a pro-drop language due to the complex person-number
morphology of verb forms, BVP may only have two verb forms for a given
tense: one for the first person singular and another based on the third person
singular form for all the other persons.
 175

(142) Nós chegou agora vs. Eles chegou agora

'We arrived now vs. They arrived now'
? chegou agora vs. ? chegou agora
(cf. SBP "Chegamos agora vs. Chegaram agora")

Duarte (1993) claims that present-day BP is changing from a pro-drop to a

non pro-drop language due to the impoverishment of verbal morphology.
According to her, even in the 1sg., which is still the morphologically most
marked form in the verbal paradigm, the use of an overt pronoun in subject
position occurred in all but 20% of her data. The pro-drop effect was
observed in very specific contexts (ibid.:119) prompted by negation (eg.
"não pro posso mais..., não" 'I can't ...anymore), a complex verb phrase (eg.
"pro preciso comprar algo" 'I have to buy something') and in certain
correferent structures (eg. "se eui pudesse, proi iria também" 'if I could, I
would go too'). However, she does not provide an explanation for the
occurrence of the pro-drop phenomenon in the environments she identifies.

In those BVP dialects in which there is only one verbal form (based on the
third person singular form) for all persons (cf. section 4.3.3) the necessity
for an overt subject pronoun is greater, since not even the first person
singular verbal form is marked for person and number, as can be seen in
(143):

Cearense BVP: Jeroslow (1974:171)

 176

(143) Eu sabe fazê isso

I know-3s to do this
'I know how to do this'
(cf. SBP "Sei fazer isso")

4.4.2.3 Possession

In some rural dialects of BVP possession may be indicated through the

juxtaposition of possessed and possessor. This is a common feature in
several Atlanctic creoles and Kwa languages (cf. Holm 1988). Examples of
this feature are particularly numerous in the rural dialect studied by Jeroslow
(1974:108):

(144) coração Deus

heart God
'God's heart'
(cf. SBP "o coração de Deus")

(145) casa Maria

house Maria
'Maria's house'
(cf.SBP "a casa da Maria")
(146) Dona Lola Dotô Idasio
 177

Mrs. Lola Dr. Idasio

'Dr. Idasio's Mrs. Lola' (Dr. Idasio's wife, Mrs. Lola)
(cf. SBP " A Dona Lola do Dr. Idasio")

4.4.3 Prepositions

Several authors have also pointed out differences in preposition use between
EP and BP (cf. Ramos 1989 and 1992). One such example is the use of
para ~ pra ~ pa 'for' after certain verbs meaning 'to' (cf. Holm 1992:61).
An example of this use is found below:

(147) Ninguém contou pra mim

nobody told to me
'Nobody told me'
(cf. SBP Ninguém me contou)

Holm (1987:421-422) discussing the use of para in BVP points out that this
feature also occurred in the old Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean (cf. Mi
ablar per ti 'I tell you' [Schuchardt 1909:445]). Holm (idem) also suggests
that this same structure is found in Indo-Portuguese due to relexification (cf.
Eu té fallá per vós, literally 'I say for you' in the sense of 'I tell you').
The absence of prepositions in BVP constructions whose counterparts in the
standard require prepositions is another striking characteristic of this
 178

language:

(148) Celma deu ø Joana um presente

Celma gave Joana a present
'Celma gave Joana a present'
(cf. SBP "Celma deu um presente a/para Joana")

In SBP the verb dar 'give' requires a preposition; however, in the vernacular
lects the preposition may be absent. The lack of a preposition as
examplified in (148) may give rise to the reordering of verb arguments. The
canonical order for arguments in standard Brazilian and European
Portuguese, when these are represented by full NPs, is [V NP PP] in which
NP stands for a direct object, and PP for an indirect object (cf. "João deu [o
livro]NP [a Manuel]PP" 'John gave the book to Manuel'). The argumental
grid of BVP verbs, however, seems to be reanalysed into the form [V NP1
NP2] in which NP1 stands for the indirect object and NP2 for the direct
object. As a consequence of this constituent order rearrangement, word
order plays a crucial role in the interpretation of the sentence, since the
argument immediatelly postposed to the verb has an indirect object function.
This same phenomenon also occurs in Guinea-Bissau Creole Portuguese, as
can be seen below:

GB: Peck (1988:128)

(149) Jon da Maria librus
 179

John give Mary books

'John gave the books to Mary'

Lack of preposition is also present in the following examples from Jeroslow

(1974:148-9); however, there is no word order effect because the verbs
require only one postposed argument and preposition chopping occurs in
complement structures:

(150) você vai dá um banho ø seu cavalo 45

you go give a bath your horse
'You go give a bath to your horse'
(cf. SBP "Você vai dar um banho no seu cavalo")

(151) pa dá fim ø o rapaz

to give end the fellow
'To put an end to the fellow'
(cf. SBP " Para dar um fim no rapaz)

(152) dá água ø animal

give water animal

45 In this example, although the diargumental verb dar 'to give' is used, it is monoargumental since it
belongs to the set verbal construction dar um banho 'to bathe'. The same occurs in examples (151) with dar
fim literally 'give end' 'to end', and in (152) with dar água 'give water' in which both verbal constructions
also have each a single meaning (cf. dar comida literally 'give food', 'to feed').
 180

'Give water to the animal'

(cf. SBP "Dá água ao animal")

(153) Nunca comprou fiado ø ninguém

never bought on credit nobody
' (He, She) never bought on credit from anybody'
(cf. SBP "Nunca comprou fiado de ninguém)

Perhaps one of the most striking differences in preposition use between BVP
and the standard is the use of the preposition em 'in' and its variants (˜i, ni,
no, na) with verbs of movement, instead of just as a locative preposition as
in standard EP. This use is current in several of the Portuguese-based
creoles, and it was also a characteristic of archaic Portuguese, which
inherited it directly from Latin (cf. Bueno 1955:214). Therefore, once again
a convergence of factors might have influenced the preference for this type
of pattern in the use of prepositions in Brazil.

AP: Camões-Filodemo (sixteenth century)

(154) Indo dar em h˜ua fonte
going arrive in a spring
'Ending up at a spring'
(cf. SBP: "Indo dar a uma fonte")

(155) BVP: Eu vou no cinema hoje

 181

I go in-the movies today

'I'm going to the movies today'
(cf. SBP "Vou ao cinema hoje")

GB: Peck (1988:211)

(156) Bajudas yanda-yanda toki e ciga na prasa
girls walk-walk until they arrive in downtown
'The girls walked continuously until they arrived downtown'
(cf. SBP: As garotas andaram até chegarem ao centro)

The variant ni of the preposition em [˜i] is unknown in both EP and SBP. Its
origin is not clear, but Holm (1994:61) suggests that it might have been
influenced by the Yoruba preposition ní 'in, at' or might be the result of
"back-formation by analogy with [...] the preposition de [^ji] 'of'" in the
following paradigm:

(157) do (de + o); da (de + a)

no (ni + o); na (ni + a)

An example of the use of ni is provided below:

BVP: Coelho 1880-86 (1967:39)

(158) Quando mozo vai ni rua
 182

when young-man goes in street

'When the lad goes out to the street'
(cf. SBP "Quando o moço vai à rua")

Ni is also present in Sãotomense Creole Portuguese, as illustrated by the

following example:

ST: Coelho 1880-1886 (1967:112)

(159) Ua dja mbá ni Plá-Gato
one day I-went in beach-cat
'One day I went to Cat Beach'
(cf. SBP "Um dia fui à Praia do Gato")

4.4.4 Word order

4.4.4.1 Interrogative sentences

Unlike all other Romance languages (except those influenced by African

languages), subject-verb inversion in question constructions is not
commonly found in BVP (cf. Berlinck 1988 and 1989). Intonation alone
indicates questioning. This pattern is even found in wh-questions, in which
the wh-element may remain in situ postverbally:
 183

(160) A Maria chegou?

the Maria arrived
'Did Maria arrive?'
(cf. EP "Chegou a Maria?")

(161) A Maria chegou quando?

the Maria arrived when
'When did Maria arrive?'
(cf. EP "Quando chegou a Maria?)

According to Rossi (1993:331) the lack of verb and question word

movement in BVP interrogatives is a consequence of the impoverishment of
verbal morphology.

Holm (1992:62) points out that the lack of subject-verb inversion in

interrogative clauses is a common feature of the Atlantic creoles and several
of their African substrate languages. Holm's analysis seems more
convincing than Rossi's and has the further advantage of relating BVP to its
history of contact with African languages and its similarities to the
Portuguese-based creoles. Further evidence for the language contact nature
of this feature is provided by Schwegler (p.c.) who states that this is also a
common characteristic of the vernacular Caribbean Spanish of Cuba and the
Dominican Republic (e.g., ¿Qué tu quieres? 'What do you want?').
 184

4.4.4.2 Topicalization

In BVP there is a tendency for topics to be processed as subjects in

constructions where dummy subjects are expected in SBP, prompting
preposition chopping (and arguably a change in the verb's argumental
structure, whereby the topicalized element is indeed a gramatical subject):

(162) [Belo Horizonte]TOP chove demais ø

Belo Horizonte rains too much
'It rains too much in Belo Horizonte'
(cf. SBP "Chove demais em Belo Horizonte")

(163) [Esse ovo]TOP é difícil de quebrar a casca ø

this egg is hard of break the shell
'It is hard to break the shell of this egg'
(cf. SBP "É difícil quebrar a casca desse ovo")

The tendency for topicalization in BVP is so overwhelming that structures

known as multi-subject sentences may occur, as discussed in Pontes (1987)
and Kato (1993). In these structures, locatives, objects and NP complements
are fronted to pre-verbal position and, in Kato's view, become "surface
subjects". Kato (1993:230) provides the following as examples to this
 185

phenomenon: 46

(164) O pneu do carro da vizinha furou (base sentence)

the tire of-the car of-the neighbor blew out

(165) O carro da vizinha, o pneu (dele) furou

the car of-the neighbor the tire (its) blew out

(166) A vizinha, o carro dela o pneu (dele) furou

the neighbor the car (hers) the tire (its) blew out

'The neighbor's car tire blew out'

4.4.4.3 Highlighting

Another interesting feature of BVP is the pervasive presence of the so-called

that-t effect 47 . Interrogative, relative and indeterminate pronouns,
interrogative phrases and even nouns are followed by que 'that' with an
apparent null meaning. This structure, however, resembles question

46Strictly speaking, however, these sentences have only one grammatical subject, despite the presence of
several topicalized NPs.

47 This term originated in Government and Binding theory and refers to doubly-filled COMP.
 186

particles, complementizers and highlighters in Haitian Creole French and in

the Portuguese-based creoles of West Africa.

(167) Quem que chegou?

Who that arrived
'Who arrived?'
(cf. SBP "Quem chegou?" or "Quem foi que chegou?")

(168) Zé que quebrou a janela

Zé that broke the window
'It was Zé who broke the window'
(cf. SBP "Foi o Zé quem quebrou a janela")

(169) Que cigarro que ocê fuma?

What cigarrete that you smoke
'What cigarrete do you smoke?'
(cf. SBP "Que cigarro você fuma?)

(170) Eu sei onde que ela mora

I know where that she lives
'I know where she lives'
(cf. SBP "Sei onde ela mora")

Haitian Creole French: DeGraff (1992:91)

 187

(171) kimoun ki malad? 48

who that sick
'Who is sick?'

CV: Cardoso (1989:103)

(172) Falo-m ken k' sej
tell-me who that leave
'Tell me who left'

ST: Ferraz and Valkhoff (1975:25)

(173) kene ku bi (ai) ni ke no oti
who that come there in house our yesterday
'Who came here to our house yesterday?'

Constructions in which that-t effect is present in BP seem to have ultimately

been derived from the emphatic form que é que 'wh-is-wh' present in EP
since the archaic period of the language (from the twelfth to the sixteenth
century) as que é o que 'wh-is-that-wh'. 49 It seems likely that this structure
was reinterpreted during the restructuring of Portuguese as question word +
highlighter by speakers of African languages.

48 DeGraff (1992:91) considers ki a complementizer in his Principles and Parameter analysis of Haitian
Creole French.

49According to Roberts, (1993) a similar emphatic structure has also been present in French since the
Medieval period as (qu)'est-ce que.
 188

The following are examples of highlighters from the West African creoles:

Príncipe Creole Portuguese: Günter (1973:99)

(174) éli ki sa ká∫i aré
this that be house king
'This is the house of the king'

Guinea-Bissau Creole Portuguese: Chataigner (1963:46) 50

(175) Báka ki se pápe
cow that be superior
'It's the cow who is superior'

Guinea-Bissau Creole Portuguese: Kihm (1994:230)

(176) Nunde ku n puy saku
where that I put bag
'Where did I put the bag?'

4.4.4.4 Relative clauses

50 Holm (1988:181) says that "Chataigner (1963:46) [...] (points out) how ki corresponds syntactically to
Mandinka le and Wolof a, both highlighters." Holm further notes the correspondence between the Guinea-
Bissau CP highlighter ki/ku and the Manjaku highligher (k)i.
 189

Relative clauses in BVP have been the subject of much study (cf. Tarallo
1983 and references cited there). It has been shown that the relativizer que
'that', 51 used almost exclusively in speech, replaces all other relative
pronouns common to Portuguese, as in the following examples:

(177) A casa que eu moro (nela)

the house that I live in-it
'The house I live in'
(cf. SBP "A casa em que / onde moro")

(178) O amigo que eu falei (com ele) ontem

the friend that I spoke with-he yesterday
'The friend I spoke with yesterday'
(cf. SBP "O amigo com quem falei ontem")

(179) O aluno que eu conheço o pai (dele)

the student that I know the father of-him
'The student whose father I know'
(cf. SBP "O aluno cujo pai conheço")

As a consequence of the existence of only one relative pronoun, BVP has

two relativizing strategies: the resumptive pronoun construction (eg., o

51 Que may in fact be a simple complementizer.

 190

aluno que eu conheço o pai dele literally 'the student that I know the father
of his') and the cleft construction (eg., o aluno que eu conheço o pai ø
literally 'the student that I know the father'). In the first relativizing strategy
it is worth noting that the use of resumptive pronouns is a salient
characteristic, necessary to recuperate the semantic content lost in the use of
the unmarked pronoun que without the pied-piping strategy present in
standard relativization in Portuguese. 52 As can be seen in the example
above, it seems that the main semantic contribution of a resumptive pronoun
preceded by a preposition is to disambiguate a sentence meaning. 53 On the
other hand, the cleft construction (in which there is PP-chopping) could have
three possible interpretations if it were not for the presence of the
Prepositional Phrase; which in the example provided is com ele 'with him'
ensuing the following readings: (a) 'the friend I spoke with', (b) 'the friend I
spoke of', and (c) 'the friend I spoke about'. Tarallo (1983) pointed out that
the more restructured the dialect (i.e. the less standard-like), the more
frequent the use of resumptive pronouns is. He concluded that urban middle-
class speakers of BP tend to stigmatize the resumptive pronoun strategy,
prefering to use the more ambiguous forms referred to above as the cleft
construction (i.e., the avoidance strategy).

52In standard Portuguese if the relative pronoun que is used, pied-piping ensues, i.e. there is PP fronting,
e.g., a casa em que moro literally 'the house in which I live'.

53 Kato (1993) remarks that although the resumptive pronoun strategy is usually abundant in
morphologically poor languages, it may occur in languages which have a complex morphology, such as
Old Romance and Spanish.
 191

It is instructive to observe that in the Portuguese creoles of Cape Verde,

Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé relative clauses are formed through the use of
a single complementizer ke or ku, which derives from the Portuguese
relative pronoun que 'that'. All these languages also employ the resumptive
pronoun strategy as part of relativization, as shown below:

CV: Cardoso (1989:103)

(180) Kel ome ke n fala k' el
that man that I speak with him
'The man I'm speaking with'

GB: Peck (1988:35)

(181) N mora na casa ku bo mora-ba n'el 54
I live in-the house that you live -ANT in it
'I live in the house you used to live in'

ST: Ferraz (1979:71)

(182) ke k˜u sa 'n-e

54Kihm (1994) observes that the cleft sentence strategy in which there is preposition chopping can also
occur in Guinea Bissau creole [cf. omi ku n konta-u literally 'man that I told you', 'the man I told you about'
(Kihm 1994:180).
 192

house that-I be in-it

'The house I am in'

A relativizer strategy much less often used in BVP is juxtaposition, in

which no relative pronoun is present:

Jeroslow (1974:194)
(183) O frade morava no sobrado ø era muito alto
the priest lived in-the house REL was very high
'The priest lived on the second floor (which) was very high'

Jeroslow (1974:194)
(184) Tem muita gente ø é comprida em conversa
have many people REL is long in conversation
'There are a lot of people (who) are long winded'

The relativizing strategy in (183) and (184) is also present in Angolar Creole
Portuguese (spoken in São Tomé) as exemplified below:

Angolar Creole Portuguese: Lorenzino (forthcoming)

(185) N tha ˜ua ΩmE ø ka tamba mΩtxiru
 193

I be-PRES a man REL HAB fish much

'I am a man who fishes a lot'

4.4.4.5 Zero object anaphora

The phenomenon referred to as zero object anaphora in BVP was studied by

Teixeira (1986) and Negrão (1986). In these structures the object is either
deleted or fronted to topic position (cf. section 4.4.4.2) leaving behind an
empty category. In either case, if the NP was governed by a preposition, the
latter is also deleted. These structures are exemplified below:

Pronominal anaphora: NP deletion: Teixeira (1986:64)

(186) Eu descasquei as laranjas e Pedro comeu ø
I peeled the oranges and Pedro ate ANP

' I peeled the oranges and Pedro ate them'

(cf. SBP "Descasquei as laranjas e Pedro as comeu")

Topicalization with preposition chopping

(187) Mamãe eu dei ø um presente lindo
mother I gave ANP a present wonderful
'I gave mother a wonderful present'
(cf. SBP "Dei um presente lindo para a / à mamãe")
 194

William Stewart (p.c.) suggests that this anaphoric strategy may be an

analogical construction, similar to elliptical EP and SBP short answers that
totally omit objects:

(188) Q: Você viu o filme? A: Vi ø

you saw the film? I-saw ANP

'Did you watch the movie? Yes, I did"

Cyrino (1993) and Nunes (1993) offer the same hypothesis for the
occurrence of what both call a null object in BP [a null direct object in (186)
and a null indirect object in (187)]. According to both authors this has been
an innovative diachronic change in BP tied to a parametric change in the
grammar of this language, which they presume occurred in the nineteeth
century. Both Cyrino and Nunes argue that the occurrence of null objects in
present-day BP is directly related to the decreasing use of accusative clitics
(especially 3sg. clitic) and the concomitant increased use of tonic pronouns
instead of clitics (cf. 4.3.5 above). However, both authors fail to explain
why the decrease of clitic pronouns should cause the occurrence of null
objects. Furthermore, both authors analyze historical data taken from plays
in which casual educated speech is used but not BVP lects.

In my own view, zero object anaphora in BVP parallels the similar

construction in relative clauses and topicalization (cf. sections 4.4.4.4 and
4.4.4.2). As seen in 4.4.4.4 above, the cleft relative clause in BVP also
 195

presents an anaphoric element that may be realized overtly through the use
of a preposition followed by a resumptive pronoun. The same is possible in
both (186) and (187), as it is in the topicalization data presented in 4.4.4.2
(cf. Esse ovoi é difícil de quebrar a casca {(øi) (d[elei])} literally 'This egg,
it is dificult to break the shell {(ø) (of it)', 'It is difficult to break the shell of
this egg'). In (186) the anaphor stands for a null element which is made
possible through ellipsis (note that the null object is correferent with the
object in the anterior sentence, therefore being deleted). In SBP, instead of
the anaphor, a clitic could be the overt object (cf. SBP "Eu descasquei [as
laranjasi] e Pedro asi comeu"). However, as mentioned in 4.3.5, the use of
clitics is very limited in BVP, whereby its speakers would either use the
anaphoric construction or a subject pronoun as in "Eu descasquei [as
laranjas]i e Pedro comeu elasi ".

In example (187) an anaphor is created through the topicalization of an

indirect object. It is noteworthy that topicalization only occurs after another
process takes place, i.e., first the indirect object is moved to the immediate
postverbal position due to preposition chopping (and consequent
rearrangement in the argumental grid of the verb), only then is the NP
topicalized (cf. discussion on preposition use in section 4.4.3). In this case,
the semantic content of the anaphor could also be recuperated through the
resumptive pronoun strategy, whereby the sentence would be: "Mamãei, eu
dei elai um presente lindo".
 196

4.5 Summary

This chapter presented an overview of the BVP features which differ most
from the standard variety. Starting with the lexico-semantic component, it
was suggested that BVP had a very large input of lexical items from
Amerindian and African languages, and has also preserved forms from
archaic Portuguese which have been lost in contemporary standard
Portuguese.

The phonological component of BVP shows a great divergence from SBP as

well as from EP. Nevertheless, through comparative methods, it can be
observed that some of the tendencies present in BVP were already
manifested in some of the vernacular dialects of archaic Portuguese and are
present in the contemporary Portuguese-based creoles of Africa. Among the
most striking features of BVP phonology is the tendency towards syllable
simplification into a consonant-vowel pattern.

Although morphological processes in BVP pattern very similarly to those in

SBP, two areas are quite distinct. These are plural marking and verbal
conjugations. While in SBP agreement rules for plurality apply across the
board in the NP, in BVP only the leftmost element of the NP usually bears
plural marking. As for verbal endings, it was shown that the verbal
paradigms in BVP are extremelly reduced compared to those found in the
 197

standard language. More often than not, there are only two differentiated
verbal forms, one for 1sg and the other (based on the 3sg form) for all other
persons.

Several aspects of the syntax of BVP were discussed, including the

simplification of relativization strategies, predicate double negation, zero
anaphora for left dislocated and topicalized phrases, the use of overt subject
pronouns, the lack of reflexive pronouns and passivization strategies.

Some of these features were already present in the archaic Portuguese

dialects brought to colonial Brazil. Others are common in the Portuguese-
based creoles and their African substrates. Some have been claimed to be
innovations of BVP as it evolved in isolation from EP. In the next chapter
an evaluation of these hypothesis will be presented, taking into consideration
general tendencies in language change, language contact and second-
language acquisition. The role that all these factors played in the genesis of
BVP will be discussed, as well as the hypothesis of a possible convergence
of these different sources.
 198

CHAPTER 5

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRAZILIAN VERNACULAR

PORTUGUESE

5.0 General remarks

The issue of the socio-historical and linguistic processes that shaped BVP
leads to the question of the role played by the millions of Africans brought
to Brazil and their contact with the indigenous peoples and the Portuguese
colonizers. The first observation that comes to mind when this topic is
assessed is the complex nature of the linguistic situation in colonial Brazil. It
is a well known fact that early colonial Brazil was characterized by linguistic
diversity, represented mostly by the native languages of the indigenous
peoples, numerous regional dialects of European Portuguese and African
languages, not to mention the contact languages brought to Brazil from
Africa as well as the ones that developed among these various groups. As a
natural consequence of this linguistic diversity, bilingualism and
multilingualism ensued. Ultimately, as can be observed of the current
 199

linguistic situation in Brazil, Portuguese won out over all other competing
languages for the vast majority of the population.

In this chapter the nature of contact among the languages spoken in colonial
Brazil will be analyzed in light of the interplay between the socio-historical
information that is available to us and the frameworks provided by modern
theories of language contact. The backbone of this chapter is the belief that
'the history of a language is a function of the history of its speakers, and not
an independent phenomenon that can be thoroughly studied without
reference to the social context in which it is embedded' (Thomason and
Kaufman 1988:4).

5.1 Theoretical framework

Following previous studies of BVP and the literature on language change,

language contact phenomena in general and creolization in particular, two
different frameworks can be proposed to account for the genesis and
development of BVP, namely (1) internal language change and drift
(system-internal motivations and mechanisms), and (2) language contact
induced innovations (external influences).

The first theory encompasses intrasystemic causes, that is, internal

developmental tendencies of Portuguese dialects, including archaic varieties,
 200

and as claimed by some scholars (cf. Tarallo 1986 and Tarallo and Kato
1989) also untargeted changes. The second theory contemplates the possible
effects of language contact situations, namely transfer through language
borrowing and shift, as well as creolization. The two frameworks are not
intrinsically mutually exclusive, since it has been noted in the literature that
even attested creoles may include archaic features from their lexifier
languages in their phonology, morphosyntax and lexicons, as well as other
features not found in their substrate languages. The kinds of linguistic
hybridization that result from long-term language isolation and language
contact can hardly ever be adequately classified in a binary system. It is
more likely for a broader assessment to provide more meaningful answers to
the questions posed in this study.

The following sections examine the above theoretical frameworks; however,

it is important to note from the outset that our focus is centered on the
intrasystemic developmental tendencies of Portuguese and language contact
phenomena. The study of untargeted changes is approached with caution
here since they cannot be proven beyond doubt; they can only be challenged
in face of linguistic evidence strong enough to provide alternative
explanations for particular developments.

5.1.1 Internal developmental tendencies of Portuguese dialects and

the preservation of archaic features
 201

The fact that languages change over time is a point of consensus among
linguists. For example, no one doubts that vulgar Latin was the common
origin of the Romance languages. Some BVP scholars have argued that this
same line of thought accounts for the differences between present day BVP
and EP. This theory is based on the assumption that the vernacular
Portuguese dialects taken to Brazil in the sixteenth century remained isolated
from the normative pressure of the standard language due to the lack of
schools and formal instruction in general, reinforcing phonological and other
tendencies already present in the Romance languages. The plausibility of
internal developmental processes resulting in BVP depends heavily on the
attestation of the deviant features noted in BVP as tendencies in archaic
Portuguese dialects as a whole, and not in individual modern dialects, as has
been claimed by some scholars. Some of these features, namely
phonological ones, have been argued to follow a general trend in Romance
languages. It has been claimed that Portuguese has a preference for
consonant-vowel syllabic structure and that deletion of word-final segments
is not uncommon in Romance languages. Therefore, the phonological rules
of s-deletion and denasalization discussed in chapter four would be in
perfect accord with natural drift tendencies in Portuguese. This point is
made in Révah (1963:442-3) when he argues against creole influences on
BVP:

[..] On the contrary, the relative simplification of inflexions in the

vernacular language in Brazil fits perfectly within a phonetic
 202

tendency, which is not exclusively Portuguese, but Iberian-Romance:

it is what B. Malmberg calls the tendency "to favor open syllables".

As for s-deletion, Révah gives examples from the Porto Santo area (in the
Azores) in which the same phenomenon can allegedly be observed (ibid.
443): ai bika faze liñu nai rosa (P as bicas fazem ninho nas rochas).
Denasalization is also claimed to be common in the EP of Guimarães, Fafe,
Minho, as well as in the Spanish of Andalusia and the Canary Islands.55 The
simplification of the verbal paradigm is said to follow the same pattern
found in French. 56 Révah's conclusion is that there is a coincidence between
these features and those of BVP that represents the natural tendencies of
Portuguese, Amerindian and creole languages (ibid. 448):

(...) the lack of proven evidence for the Amerindian and African
languages influence on phonetic and morphosyntactic aspects of the
popular speech system of Brazil make it extremely improbable to
attribute this influence to these languages, given that those are
isolated features which are common to the Brazilian language, the

55 This would have to mean a loss of nasal consonants rather than nasal vowels, which do not have
phonemic status in Spanish.

56 The French simplification results almost wholly from phonological loss, not from inflexional leveling.
First and second person plural are not leveled to third person singular as in much BVP. Third person plural
forms ar not replaced by , or homophonous with, third person singular forms, except in conjugation I, e.g.,
finissent [finis] and finit [fini].
 203

Portuguese language (continental and insular) and to authentic creole

languages. [My translation, HRM; italics in the French original.]

However, more than just referring to similarities of features between BVP

and some isolated cases in EP dialects, the defenders of natural drift would
have to show what the connection between BVP and those continental
dialects are, as well as explain why these features do not occur in EP as a
whole today.

More recent endorsements of the natural drift hypothesis can be found in

variationist studies such as Naro and Lemle (1976) and Lemle and Naro
(1977), in which it is argued that the simplification of BVP morphosyntax is
still under way, supposedly setting modern BVP apart from earlier stages of
this language, in which subject-verb agreement, for example, was according
to them a categorical rule. However, it is important to note that other
explanatory possibilities for the current grammatical features of BVP cannot
be forgotten. As will be discussed below, it is more likely that colonial BVP
was much more restructured than it is today, given that during colonial times
it was learned as a second language by a large number of African language
speakers and passed on to their children and to the white children they cared
for. In this scenario, BVP would be changing towards standard Portuguese,
rather than moving apart from it.

Naro and Scherre (1993) take a more conciliatory approach when they admit
 204

what they call 'a confluence of motives' for the genesis of present day BVP.
However, they too, argue strongly for a EP origin for most of the
grammatical phenomena discussed in chapter four. They say that:

Throughout the history of the Portuguese language in Brazil, contact

with populations of diverse linguistic origins has caused the
language to develop differently than it has in Portugal, but the
ultimate source of the changes that occurred in Brazil can be
traced back to Portugal. (emphasis, HRM)
(Naro and Scherre 1993:437)

It is argued by defenders of the drift theory that sixteenth-century EP already

had the embryo of the analytic tendencies that Portuguese took in Brazil.
According to this view (cf. Naro and Scherre 1993:442), the Romance
languages, and Indo-European languages in general for that matter, for
centuries have been drifting towards morphological uniformity, with only
the more irregular (and therefore more salient) features surviving. However,
such strong claims have been made without enough data and diachronic
analyses that would be supportive of them.

5.1.2 Language contact processes

In the framework of language contact processes, different scenarios may be

considered for the kinds of linguistic phenomena that are likely to have
 205

taken place in colonial Brazil. Within this framework, two main routes of
analysis may be taken (one, however, does not exclude the other). On the
one hand BVP can be seen as the product of transfer of linguistic features,
achieved through either large-scale borrowing (e.g., African substrate
features borrowed into Portuguese) or from the maintenance of
interlanguage features by Africans in the process of switching from their
mother tongues to Portuguese, therefore undergoing language shift. On the
other hand, BVP may also have undergone at least partial restructuring and
then decreolization in previous developmental stages.

5.1.2.1 Language borrowing

As defined by Thomason and Kaufman (1988:37) 'borrowing is the

incorporation of foreign features into a group's native language by speakers
of that language: the native language is maintained but is changed by the
addition of the incorporated features'. Borrowing usually starts with the
incorporation of words, but structural features may be incorporated as well.
Thomason and Kaufman (idem) extend borrowing to phonological, phonetic,
syntactic and morphological elements. Le Page (1977:251) says in the
context of genetic models for linguistic development that ' ...I would
maintain that large-scale lexical borrowing always has phonological and
syntactic consequences, and that these aspects of one's linguistic systems are
interdependent.'
 206

When considering borrowing in the case of the genesis of BVP, the possible
social scenarios have to be kept in mind. To this date the exact number of
Africans brought to Brazil and their origins are not completely known.
What is clear at this point is that those Africans lived in a linguistically
diverse environment in Brazil. References are made in the literature (cf.
Naro 1978) to the fact that many Africans are likely to have been
multilingual during the time of the slave trade. Before the Atlantic crossing,
the slaves were usually christened and possibly acquired rudiments of the
Portuguese language at the slaving entrepôts in the Cape Verde islands and
in São Tomé. It is very likely that instead of learning Portuguese, those
slaves in fact learned some of the Portuguese-based pidgins or creoles
already spoken at that time in those places. Furthermore, the large-scale
immigration of Portuguese sugar planters and their slaves from São Tomé to
Brazil, beginning in the late sixteenth century, also brought a large number
of native speakers of São Tomense creole to Brazil (cf. Ferraz 1979).

The features discussed in chapter four, which are common to the West
African Portuguese-based creoles, which by the most compelling evidence
all derive from the same original Portuguese-based pidgin, and to BVP, lead
to the question of how BVP came to acquire these features. The assumption
made under the borrowing hypothesis is that initially Portuguese speakers
incorporated lexical items of creole and African origin into their speech.
Gradually, through continued language contact, these borrowings were
 207

expanded to other linguistic levels. This would be achieved through the

transmission of these borrowings across generations of Portuguese speakers,
who in many cases, had as linguistic models not only their white parents but
also their slave caretakers and slave peers. In this case, prestige would not
be a variable that played a role in the process of borrowing. However,
Thomason and Kaufman (ibid. 44), discussing prestige as the only variable
in borrowing contexts ask:

(...) why would you replace some of your native lexicon and
grammatical features with those of another language unless you
wanted to emulate the speakers of that language because of
admiration or respect for them? But common sense is an unreliable
guide in historical linguistics, and the fallacy in this view has been
recognized for decades (...) 57

It is possible that the linguistic code used by Portuguese in their interaction

with Africans came to be the target language model that blacks tried to
emulate. That code is likely to have been more restructured in terms of its
lexicon and grammar than the code used among whites. Of course, the
opposite process would also have been possible. That is, since the black

57. Thomason & Kaufman provide the following quote from Jakobson, stressing that his point extends to
the whole grammar:
Contrairement à l'opinion courant l'action qu'une langue exerce sur la structure phonologique d'une autre
langue ne suppose pas nécessairement la prepondérance politique, sociale ou culturelle de la nation parlant
la première langue. Jakobson 1962[1938]:241.
 208

population was larger than the white in rural areas, and since whites had
constant dealings with the Africans, it would have been easier for
Portuguese speakers to learn the pidgin which the linguistically diverse
Africans would have been using with one another, than it would have been
for EP speakers to try to teach this numerically larger group how to speak
EP, especially because a pidgin language is much easier to learn. It cannot
be assumed that the Portuguese did not also accommodate by imitating and
learning the African's version of Portuguese, regardless of where, when, and
how that version originated.

5.1.2.2 Language shift

Interference through language shift, according to Thomason and Kaufman

(1988:212), 'results from imperfect group learning' of a new language by a
group shifting away from their old language. In the Brazilian scenario, the
descendants of first generation slaves who spoke either African languages or
a creole as a native language would ultimately shift to Portuguese. Due to
the discrepancy between the large number of slaves and the small number of
whites on plantations and in mining areas, it is likely that in the process of
learning Portuguese, the slaves never achieved full proficiency in the target
language, thus perpetuating in their speech (as a second language) and in
that of their descendants (as a first language) interlanguage features.
 209

It is also possible that newly arrived Africans had a pidgin or creole

Portuguese as their target language in plantations and mining areas. Their
descendants, however, would have spoken a creole Portuguese natively and
later generations would have shifted to Portuguese, preserving some creole
features in their speech.

In either scenario, this restructured speech would, according to the language

shift interpretation, later be learned natively by slaves born in Brazil, as well
as mulattos, lower-class whites and the children of the upper-classes who
were cared for by slaves (in this case, even upper class Brazilians would
have native proficiency in BVP).

It is important to note that language borrowing and language shift are not
mutually exclusive processes. The two may occur at the same time. As
Thomason and Kaufman (ibid. 45) put it, 'target-language speakers may be
borrowing words and possibly even structural features from a language
whose speakers are in the process of shifting to the target language and
incorporating their learners' errors into it'. In the Brazilian case, a uniform
shift theory would be complicated by the large number of languages spoken
by the African slaves, and the typological differences among them,
ultimately implying that some type of leveling in the Portuguese varieties
spoken the slaves would have to have taken place.
 210

5.1.2.3 Creolization and decreolization

Although up to this date there is no definitive evidence of fully creolized

languages having developed in Brazil (but cf. Ferreira 1985 and Baxter 1992
for progress in this area), it is plausible to hypothesize their temporary
existence, given the social and linguistic conditions present since the onset
of Brazilian colonization and the slave trade. Creolization processes take
place when pidgins are nativized, typically in the context of a break in
language transmission, leading to a new language without strictly genetic
relations to any of the languages which had been in contact (Thomason and
Kaufman 1988). The social history of Brazil (cf. chapter three) included the
conditions necessary for creole language formation in some rural areas, such
as plantation and mining sites where the proportion of blacks to whites was
overwhelming. 58 The large number of African slaves from various
ethnolinguistic backgrounds on the plantations and in the mines, the small
number of whites, and the pervasive lack of formal education in Brazil until
the late nineteenth century are factors that might have contributed to the
emergence of restructured varieties of Portuguese in those areas.
Furthermore, the linguistic model provided by the West African Portuguese-
based pidgins and creoles brought to Brazil cannot be omitted from the
equation of the genesis of BVP.

58 I am not, however, suggesting that this was the typical scenario in the whole of Brazil. In small size
farms and evidently in the towns and cities, the black population had much more access to and contact with
the white population.
 211

Guy (1981:309), addressing the issue of the possible previous creolization of

BVP, asks 'how could it [Brazilian Portuguese] possibly have avoided
creolization?', given all the new syntactic features present in that language as
opposed to EP, and given the social history of Brazil.

Holm (1987:412) points out the possibility of creole languages spoken in

Brazil contributing to the Portuguese-creole component of Papiamentu (the
creole of the Netherlands Leeward Antilles) and Saramaccan (a creole
spoken in the interior of Suriname). When the Dutch and Portuguese Jews
fled from Brazil in 1654 to the Caribbean regions in which these creoles are
spoken today, they brought along their slaves, whose language apparently
contributed to the Portuguese element in Papiamentu and Saramaccan.

According to the creolization theory, two possibilities may be explored for

an explanation of the origins of BVP. First, an authentically Brazilian
creole (or creoles) may have originated on the plantations and in mining
areas. Second, slaves born in Brazil may have learned West African pidgin
and creole Portuguese from slaves brought to Brazil by way of Portuguese
port settlements such as the ones in Cape Verde and São Tomé, modeling
their speech on pidgins and creoles already spoken elsewhere.

Regardless of the origins of pidgins and creoles once purportedly spoken in

Brazil, the present morphological structure of BVP (but not the syntax) is
 212

that of a highly decreolized language, very different from that of basilectal

creoles, for example. Guy (1981:311) claims that the contact between a
creole and a standard variety of Portuguese led to a post-creole continuum
'where the basilect gradually absorbed features of the standard, and
individual basilectal speakers may even have mastered the standard, but
there continued to exist a whole spectrum of speakers with intermediate
lects'. In his view, this continuum still exists today, although the distance
between the basilect and the acrolect has diminished considerably over the
years. Thus, according to the restructuring model, it is likely that BVP has
been moving towards SBP, since schooling and massive migration to urban
centers have placed these two BP varieties in closer contact, which
ultimately may result in leveling.

If there was a creole once spoken in Brazil, its rate of decreolization would
have had to be faster than that observed in the Caribbean creoles for
example, given the relative lack of creole features in BVP compared to
Haitian or basilectal Jamaican, for example. This accelerated decreolization
would have ensued from the greater proportion of whites to blacks in Brazil
as compared to Haiti or Jamaica. According to Guy (1981:316) in Brazil:

In the earliest colonial periods blacks were a minority; they became a

majority sometime in the Eighteenth Century, and by about 1850
must have constituted 70% of the population. Thereafter, with sharply
increased European immigration, they constituted a declining fraction of
 213

the population. So the population of Brazil was never as African in

composition as Haiti or Jamaica. Therefore, all other things being equal,
we would expect more rapid decreolization in Brazil and would expect
present-day PBP to be closer to SP than Haitian Creole is to Standard
French, or Jamaican Creole is to Standard English, and of course this is
in fact what we find.

5.1.2.4 Semi-creolization

Holm (1991) proposed that some language varieties were best classified as
semi-creoles instead of post-creoles or decreolized creoles. In his view, these
languages, although exhibiting some restructuring in their grammars never
underwent full creolization. He also noted that more than one process can
lead to semi-creolization, causing difficulty in establishing exactly the route
followed by these languages leading them to their current status.

BVP is among the languages Holm (1991) classified as semi-creoles,

together with Afrikaans, American Black English, non-standard varieties of
Caribbean Spanish and Réunionnais (the vernacular French of Réunion). All
of these languages, although preserving an extensive similarity to their input
European languages' grammar and lexicon, also show some signs of
restructuring, such as reduced inflectional systems, reorganization of some
morphosyntactic and phonological features, and lexical borrowings from
 214

substrate languages.

Holm (1991) established that semi-creoles differ from post-creoles in that the
former never underwent full creolization. While a post-creole, on one hand,
results from the borrowing of lexicon and grammatical features by a creole
language in close contact with its superstrate language, a semi-creole can
ensue from the following processes:

(a) partial restructuring, through which a given language will undergo

restructuring without ever being fully pidginized;

(b) creole influence, through which a given language in close contact with a
creole will borrow lexical items and structural features.

Holm 's (1991) definition of semi-creoles fits into the broader framework
proposed in this study as shift and borrowing achieved through language
contact. Semi-creolization, then, would be a specific language contact
process through which language shift would result in restructuring similar to
that found in creoles, and borrowing would occur between an adstrate and a
creole language.

Green (forthcoming) departs from Holm's framework for semi-creolization

in analyzing non-standard Dominican Spanish, proposing an expansion to
Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) definition of language shift. Green's model
 215

for semi-creolization differs from Thomason and Kaufman's model of

language shift "in that learners (Africans, in this case) often had no one
language in common except what they could learn from the colonizers'
language". Therefore, while Thomason and Kaufman (1988) proposed a
model of language shift for a whole community that shares the same native
language, Green (idem) on the other hand, envisages semi-creolization as the
shift to the same target language by speakers of diverse first languages
which in the process prompts some degree of restructuring.

5.2 The linguistic interplay

In this section an analysis of the linguistic components in the formation of

BVP will be presented in view of the languages in contact in colonial Brazil.

5.2.1 The European Portuguese linguistic input

The Brazilian colonization brought colonizers from all over Portugal to

Brazil. It is known that the colonizers were in the majority male. Cintra
 216

(1983:32) suggests that they were mostly from the North of Portugal. The
first question that comes to mind is: what was the Portuguese spoken by the
colonizers like? We know that Portugal, despite being a small country, has
always had a great number of dialects (Melo 1981:91), like many other
European countries. Most of the colonizers, for the first two centuries of
colonization, were of simple origin, and mostly illiterate rural men. At the
time Brazil was being colonized, the Portuguese language was still being
standardized, therefore there was yet no clear linguistic supremacy of any
one dialect, although of course the language varieties spoken by the nobility
and educated upper classes had always been considered prestigious. Melo
(1981:97) suggests that archaic dialects (spoken in the fifteenth century)
were being brought to Brazil up until the seventeenth century. 59
The best sources of information about archaic Portuguese dialects are texts
from the sixteenth century as well as folk tales (cf. Leite de Vasconcellos
1963). From these sources, several features which may have played a role in
the formation of present day BVP can be appreciated. Despite the presence
of these features in archaic Portuguese texts, it is not clear how widespread
or frequent these features were in people's speech.

59 The English and Spanish brought to and established in the New World by more or less bidialectal
speakers was not their local dialects but their regional, dialect-influenced versions of the prestige
vernacular on which the standard was being formed. This may well have been the case in the Brazilian
scenario too.
 217

5.2.1.1 Archaic Portuguese syntax

In the syntax of archaic Portuguese we find interesting features like the

following. First, the preposition em 'in' was used after verbs of movement
instead of a 'to', as in:

(189) fuy en Compostela ( Cancioneiro da Vaticana, 689)

(I)-went in Compostela
'I went to Compostela)
(cf. P "Fui à Compostela")

The verb ter 'to have' was used with existential meaning instead of the
standard form haver 'there is/are', as in:
(Fernão Mendes Pinto - Peregrinação - II - 79)
(190) Nos matos da costa tem muito pau brasil...
in-the bush of-the coast have much wood brazil
'In the coastal bushes there is much brazil wood'
(cf. P "Nos matos da costa há muito pau brasil")

The preposition para 'to' was used instead of a 'to' after the verbs, dar 'to
give' and falar 'to say', as in:

(Camões, Os Lusíadas, III, 125)

(191) Pera o avô cruel (...) dizia
 218

to the grandfather cruel told

'To the cruel grandfather (he, she) said'
(cf. P "Ao avô cruel (...) dizia")

Subject pronouns were used in place of object pronouns. However, it seems

that this use was restricted to emphasis only, as in:

(Azurara, Crônica do descobrimento e conquista de Guiné, 190)

(192) Contando como cativaram elle
telling how captivated he
'Telling how (they) captured him'
(cf. P "Contando como cativaram-no")

The relative pronoun que 'that' was used as a generic form at the beginning
of relative clauses with a preposition plus a resumptive pronoun at the end,
instead of the several relative pronouns which are used in Portuguese when a
preposition is stranded to the head of a relative clause; this construction,
however, was apparently rare:

(Antônio Prestes, Auto da Ave-Maria)

(193) Um rato que o queijo é dele
a rat that the cheese is of-his
'A rat to whom the cheese belongs'
(cf. P " Um rato de quem é o queijo" or "Um rato a quem o
 219

queijo pertence" )

The generic form homem 'man' was used as the subject in active clauses
which would otherwise be expressed through passive constructions, as in:

(194) ... outra coisa que homem veja (Sá de Miranda - 30)
...other thing that man see
'...anything else that be seen'
(cf. P "... outra coisa que seja vista" or
"...outra coisa que se veja)

The indicative imperfect preterit was used for the conditional (which
resulted in a simplification in the use of verb tense): 60

(195) Como ele ficava bom (Leite de Vasconcellos (1963:119)

as he was good
'As he would be good'
(cf. P "Como ele ficaria bom")

A serial verb-like construction was used with the verb ir 'to go' in which the
semantic content resembles a discourse marker:

60This particular feature is present in modern EP as well.

 220

(196) E vai um diz (Leite de Vasconcellos (1963:111)

and goes one says
'And then someone says'
(cf. P "E então um [alguém] diz")

5.2.1.2 Archaic Portuguese phonology

Scholars have claimed that most of the commonly known phenomena at the
level of phonetics and phonology in BVP are direct descendants of EP forms
(cf. Melo 1981). The following examples of archaic European Portuguese,
which are also found in current BVP rural dialects, are extracted from
Nascentes (1953), who provides the pertinent references.

(197) Prothesis:
avoá 'to fly' (cf. P "voar")
alimpar 'to clean' (cf. P "limpar")
arrã 'frog' (cf. P "rã")

(198) Epenthesis:
Silivério (cf. P Silvério)
reculuta 'recruit' (cf. P "recruta")

(199) Apheresis:
 221

Zabé (cf. P "Isabel")

Delaida (cf. P "Adelaide")

(200) Syncope:
arve 'tree' (cf. P "árvore")
marme 'marble' (cf. P "mármore")

(201) Metathesis:
largato 'lizard' (cf. P "lagarto")
tauba 'board' (cf. P "tábua")
drumir 'to sleep' (cf. P "dormir") 61
(202) Assimilation:
tamém 'also' (cf. P "também")
estâmago 'stomach' (cf. P "estômago)

(203) Denasalization:
orgo 'organ' (cf. P "órgão")
Cristovo (cf P "Cristóvão")
foro 'they-went' (cf. P "foram")

(204) Monophthongization:

61 This form occurs in all Iberian-based creoles.

 222

eu -> o
Ogênia (cf. P "Eugênia")

ou -> o
oro 'gold' (cf. P "ouro")

ei -> e
pexe 'fish' (cf. P "peixe")

(205) Depalatalization:
le 'him, her, them' (cf. P "lhe")

(206) Elision of r:
má 'sea' (cf. P "mar")

(207) Palatalization:
pintyá 'to comb' (cf. P "pentear")

(208) Consonant alternation

v -> b
bage 'green bean' (cf. P "vagem")
birge 'virgin' (cf. P "virgem")
baca 'cow' (cf. P "vaca")
 223

l -> r
prantar 'to plant' (cf. P "plantar")
arma 'soul' (cf. P "alma")

All the phonological features mentioned above are also found in the folk
tales in Leite de Vasconcellos (1963). Some features, such as denasalization
in the last syllable of a word and the alternation of v and b are pervasive
throughout the volume.

In the lexical level, many words and expressions which were common in
archaic Portuguese are still found in BVP with their original forms, while
their current forms in SBP and EP have changed. Below, a partial list of
common words found in archaic Portuguese with identical or similar forms
in BVP is provided: 62

(209) num 'not' (cf. P "não")

(210) home, omi 'man' (cf. P "homem")
(211) cum 'with' (cf. P "com")
(212) viero 'they-came' (cf. P "vieram")
(213) foro "they-went' (cf. P "foram")
(214) ˜ua 'one-fem' (cf. P "uma")
(215) munto 'very' (cf. P "muito")

62Sources : Leite de Vasconcellos (1963) and Melo (1981).

 224

(216) semos, samos 'we-are' (cf. P "somos")

(217) invaporar 'evaporate' (cf. P "evaporar")
(218) mulesta 'disease' (cf. P "moléstia")
(219) memo 'even' (cf. P "mesmo")
(220) pessuir 'to posses' (cf. P "possuir")
(221) auga 'water' (cf. P "água")
(222) munho 'mill' (cf. P "moinho")
(223) vai senão quando 'suddenly' (cf. P "de repente")
(224) l˜ua 'moon' (cf. P "lua")
(225) antão 'then' (cf. P "então")
(226) golo 'sip' (cf. P "gole")
(227) inté 'until' (cf. P "até")
(228) xicra 'cup' (cf. P "xícara")
(229) tresantonte 'the day before yesterday' (cf. P "trás-ante-ontem")

5.2.2 The Amerindian linguistic input

It is estimated that at the time of the discovery of Brazil, there were about
five million Amerindians living in what is today Brazilian territory, speaking
about 1,175 languages (Rodrigues 1993:91). During the colonization period
alone, it is estimated that 85% of these people died. Today, calculations
point to a total of about 262,000 Amerindians in Brazil (Gomes 1993:63-64)
speaking approximately 180 languages.
 225

We unfortunately know almost nothing about the astounding number of

languages spoken at the time of arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil. The best
records of indigenous languages were made by the Jesuits, who often tried to
teach the Christian faith to the Indians in their native languages (cf. Leite
1938 and Silva Neto 1963:32-33 ).

On the coast, the predominant indigenous languages were of the Tupi

family. A koineized version of Tupi was called Língua Geral. This
language not only served as a contact language, but according to the records,
it was also the first language of mixed Brazilians born of Portuguese fathers
and Indian mothers (Silva Neto 1963:136). According to Rodrigues (1986)
some varieties of this language were first known as 'Language of the Land'
and 'Language of the Sea'. In the seventeenth century it was generally
known as Brasílica Language, and only in the second half of the seventeenth
century did its name become Língua Geral.

Elia (1992: 27-28) as well as Rodrigues (1986) point out that there were
several varieties of Língua Geral in colonial Brazil. According to both
authors, there was a type of Jesuit Tupi that was used by Jesuit missionaries
in their Christening of Indians. This language variety, although Tupi-based,
had several Latin grammatical features, clearly introduced by the Jesuits.
Besides this variety, there were both northern and southern varieties of
Língua Geral.
 226

The southern variety, which apparently had its origin in the Tupi spoken by
the indigenous groups of the same name in São Vicente and the Tietê River
valley in the area of today's state of São Paulo later spread to the states of
Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso and the southern states of Brazil by
explorers looking for gold and precious stones known as Bandeirantes.

The northern variety of Língua Geral was based on the Tupi language
known as Tupinambá, which was spoken by indigenous peoples who lived
on the coastal area stretching from the state of Maranhão up to the state of
Pará. This language is still spoken today along the Negro River in the
Amazon region.

The influence of Tupi on Brazilian Portuguese is debated by scholars such as

Melo (1981), who suggests that its major effect was on the lexicon. He
admits, however, that the vernacular dialects of BP have "the indelible
[Tupi] mark on their sound system, morphology and phrase structure"
(ibid.:53) [my translation, HRM]. One factor that certainly makes it all the
more difficult to identify Tupi grammatical features in BVP is the similarity
that these coincidentally might share with those of African origin (cf. Melo
1981). Furthermore, social and demographic factors might have seriously
limited Tupi grammatical influence on BVP, because the speakers of Língua
Geral were better assimilated into the mainstream of Brazilian society than
people of African ancestry; therefore their Portuguese was likely to reflect
 227

less restructuring resulting from language shift due to this closer contact.

The clear Tupi origin of thousands of lexical items in BP can be appreciated

in an overwhelmingly number of Brazilian toponyms and flora, fauna,
folklore figures and culinary.

Among toponyms are a vast number of names of states and cities:

(230) Paraná
(231) Sergipe
(232) Paraíba
(233) Bagé
(234) Bauru
(235) Jacarepaguá
(236) Icaraí
(237) Abaeté
(238) Paraopeba

Some examples of Brazilian personal names from Tupi are the following:

(239) Araci
(240) Iracema
(241) Jaci
(242) Jandira
 228

(243) Moema
(244) Oiticica

Some examples of flora and fauna are: 63

(245) caju 'cashew' (< Tupi ak'iu 'fruit')

(246) juriti 'a type of bird' (< Tupi iuru'ti 'bird')
(247) capim 'grass' (< Tupi ka'pii 'grass')
(248) abacaxi 'pineapple' (< Tupi *ïuaka'ti < ï'ua 'fruit' + *ka'ti
'receding')
(249) mandioca 'manioc' (< Tupi mani'oka 'manioc')
(250) maracujá 'passion fruit' (< Tupi moruku'ia 'passion fruit')
(251) tatu 'armadillo' (< Tupi ta'tu 'armadillo')
(252) urubu 'vulture' (< Tupi uru'uu 'vulture')

Many Tupi lexical items took on Portuguese derivational morphemes,

resulting in hybrid items such as the following:

(253) cajueiro 'cashew tree' (Tupi caju + P -eiro)

(254) pitangueira 'pitanga tree' (Tupi pï'tana + P -eira)
(255) capinzal 'grassland' (Tupi ka'pii + P z + -al)
(256) capinar 'to weed' (Tupi ka'pii + P -ar)

63 All etyma in this section are from Cunha (1982).

 229

(257) pererecar 'to wander' (Tupi pere'reka 'to jump' + P -ar)

The Tupi presence can also be noted in idioms such as the following:

(258) estar na pindaíba 'to be broke' (cf. Tupi pina'ïua 'fishing rod')
(259) chorar pintanga 'to complain' (cf. Tupi pï'tana 'reddish')
(260) ficar de tocaia 'to be hidden, watching someone' (cf. Tupi
to'kaia 'hidden place')

Some of the grammatical features that Melo (1981) says that have been
attributed to Tupi influence on BVP are listed below; however, Melo (1981)
contended that all of them could be accounted for either as a drift from EP or
as universal tendencies of natural languages. The most salient features are
the following:

(261) the postposition of a quantifier to the nucleus of the NP:

gente muita
people many
'many people'
(cf. P "muita gente")

(262) Reduplication of diminutive suffixes:

pequen-ino-zinho
small -DIM-DIM
 230

very small'
(cf. P "pequenino")

(263) Reduplication of gerundive forms: 64

El' foi corrê-correno
he went run-running
'He ran'
(cf. P "Ele foi correndo")

(264) Existential use of verb ter 'to have': 65

Tem alguém aí
have someone there
'There is someone there"
(cf. P "Há alguém aí")

Among phonological features that are claimed to have been caused by Tupi
transfer are the following:

(265) simplification of consonantal clusters such as -nd:

veno

64 Especially common in the Caipira dialect.

65 Note that this feature as well as the phonological processes listed in examples (265)-(268) have also been
attributed to archaic Portuguese as well as to the Western African Portuguese-based creoles.
 231

'seeing'
(cf. P "vendo")

(266) deletion of word final r (in some instances the rule is

generalized to deletion of syllable final r):
diretô 'director' (cf. P "diretor")
Albuqueque (cf. P "Albuquerque")

(267) depalatalization of /¥/:

miyu 'corn' (cf. P "milho")
paya 'straw' (cf. P "palha")

(268) progressive nasalization:

õmi 'man' (cf. P "homem")
f˜umo 'tobbaco' (cf. P "fumo")

A morphological feature of BP that has been largely undisputed as being of

Tupi origin is the use of suffixes such as the following:

(269) -uçu 'big':

minhocuçu
'big worm'
 232

(270) -mirim 'small':

cadeira-mirim
'little chair'

(271) -oara (indicative of provenance):

marajoara
'from Marajó'

(272) -rana 'similar to':

caferana
'coffee like'

5.2.3 The African linguistic input

The slave trade brought Africans of varied linguistic backgrounds to Brazil

(cf. Maestri Filho 1988). However, from the evidence offered by the
remaining vestiges of these languages in Brazil today and the records
available, 66 they can be identified as Niger-Congo languages (cf. Armstrong
1964). It seems that basically there were two main language families in

66Ruy Barbosa, the Minister of Finances, had all documents related to the institution of slavery in Brazil
destroyed in December 14, 1890 (cf. Cintra 1985:16).
 233

Brazil: the Bantu and Kwa groups. Bantu speakers were introduced early
and spread all over the country, while Kwa speakers were introduced later
and, despite being taken to several areas in the country, apparently remained
most concentrated in Bahia (Castro 1981).

While the most common Kwa languages in Brazil were Yoruba (also known
as Nagô) and Ewe-Fon (known as Gegê), the most widespread Bantu
languages seem to have been Kimbundu, Kikongo and Umbundu
(sometimes referred to as Congo and Angola in Brazil) (Castro 1980).

Castro and Castro (1980:34-35) state that the Bantu influence on BVP is
more extensive and profound than that of Kwa languages. This conclusion
was reached by examining the etyma of a large number of Bantu borrowings
integrated into the BP lexical system, which are not even perceived by
speakers as being of African origin. The more recent Kwa borrowings,
however, are more highly concentrated in the semantic realm of religion and
are therefore more likely to be identifiable as being of African provenance.

Despite their belonging to the same large Niger-Congo language family,

Bantu and Kwa languages are typologically distinct (cf. Westermann 1930,
Greenberg 1948 and 1966, and Bamgbose 1966). Broadly speaking, Kwa
languages can be characterized as having the following features: At the
phonological level the vocalic system has seven to nine oral vowels and
some nasal vowels; the consonantal system often has a retroflex voiced
 234

dental and the labio-velars [kp, gb]. At the morphosyntactic level, the Kwa
nominal system does not have class prefixes; the verbal system is non-
inflexional (no inflexion in the verb root) but has preverbal tense, mood and
aspect markers; predicates include serial verb constructions.

The Bantu languages, on the other hand, can be broadly characterized as

having a phonological system with five oral vowels but no nasal vowels; a
consonantal system which contains several nasals as well as homorganic
nasalizing consonants and affricates. At the morphological level, nominal
classes are marked by a rich system of prefixes and suffixes, while the
verbal system has several tense, mood and aspect markers.

Bantu and Kwa languages do, however, have several traits in common,
including tonal systems and strict word order in the sentence, given the
non-inflexional nature of both the nominal and verbal systems.

Castro (1980:18-19) asserts that African words were morphologically

incorporated into Brazilian Portuguese, therefore the distinctions between
prefixes, radicals and suffixes that they originally had were not kept since
morpheme boundaries were reanalized as an individual whole, as for
example in:

(273) # ka.N.DOM.ele # -> #kandombele# -> candomblé

(cf. Kimbundu ca 'custom' + Kikongo ndombe 'a black person'
 235

+ Yoruba ile "house"; thus, 'home of black customs'

[Schneider 1991:91])

(274) # ka.N.KUND.a # -> #kakunda# -> cacunda ~ corcunda

'a hunchback'
(cf. Kimbundu diminutive prefix ka + Kimbundu kunda 'back'
[Schneider 1991:70])

5.2.3.1 African influence on phonology

Mendonça (1935:85-100) discusses the incorporation of Bantu words into

BP pointing out the following phonological adjustments they underwent:

(275) Assimilation of vowel height:

cakimbu -> cacumbu 'an old useless knife'
cazuli -> caçula 'the younger son'

(276) Dissimilation:
kijila -> quezila 'antipathy, repugnance'
kitutu -> quitute 'delicacy'

(277) Loss of prenasalization:

mbirimbau -> birimbau 'a musical instrument'
mbangala -> bengala 'cane'
 236

Among the phonological changes in BP brought about by Africans, Castro

(1980:19) points out the tendency to reorganize complex syllables into a CV
pattern as in:

(278) #sal.var# -> #sa. la. va# -> saravá 'save', that is, #CVC.CVC#
-> #CV.CV.CV#

Mendonça (1935) points out the following phonological changes in BP

caused by Africans imposing the rules of their first language on Portuguese:

(279) Depalatalization:

/¥/ -> /y/

mulher -> muyé 'woman'
folha -> foya 'leaf'

/ / -> /z/
Jesus -> Zezus
registro -> rezisto 'register'

(280) Simplification of consonantal clusters:

negro -> nego 'black'
alegre -> alegue [alEgi] 'happy'
 237

(281) Apheresis:
acabar -> cabá 'to finish'
Sebastião -> Bastião

(282) Deletion of final /r/ and /l/:

colher -> cuié 'spoon'
mel -> mé 'honey'

(283) Metathesis:
escola -> secula 'school'
escutas -> secuta 'to hear'

(284) Protheses:
Ngola -> Angola (cf. Umbundu Ngola "first king of the
Angolans)

(285) Substitution of /r/ by /l/:

rapaz -> lapassi 'lad'
carro -> calo 'car'

(286) Epenthesis:
 238

Clemente -> Quelemente

flor -> fulô 'flower'

(287) Monophthongization:
beijo -> bejo 'kiss'
louco -> loco 'crazy'

5.2.3.2 African influence on morphosyntax

Mendonça (1935:119-121) cites the following morphosyntactic features as

having been introduced into BP by Africans:

(288) Plural marking only in the determiner in a SN:

aquelas hora-ø 'those hours'

(cf. P "aquelas horas")

(289) The reanalysis of certain morpheme boundaries brought about

the formation of new items, such as:

os olhos -> o zóyo

the-PL eyes the eye

ele foi-se embora -> ele foi zimbora

 239

he went-self away he went away

(290) The masculine, plural article os 'the' is preposed to the third

person masculine singular pronoun ele 'he', forming an
invariable third person plural pronoun (o)sele 'they':

zele foro zimbora

they went away
(cf. P "Eles foram embora")

5.2.3.3 African influence on lexicon

The African lexical borrowings in BVP are very extensive and are present in
every realm of the language.There are several lexical compounds in BVP
that resulted from the combination of Portuguese and African words, as in: 67

(291) angu de caroço 'a conflict involving many people'

(cf. Kimbundu kaiangu 'a hard blow with a fist', P caroço
'lump')

67 All etymologies presented in this section are from Schneider (1991).

 240

(292) fulo de raiva 'angry'

(cf. W. African Fulani 'a member of the Fulanese people', P
raiva 'anger')

(293) virou ogó 'resulted in nothing'

(cf. P virar 'to turn' ang Yoruba ogo 'money, riches')
(294) azeite de dendê 'dendê oil'
(cf. P azeite 'oil' and Kimbundu ndende 'palm tree')

Of those African words assimilated into the BVP lexicon, many took on the
Portuguese derivational morphemes signaling different word classes, as in:

(295) cachaça (< Bantu cf. Mang'anja ka'shasu 'whiskey') 'strong

alcoholic drink'
cachac-eiro (noun) 'an habitual drunkard' (P -eiro 'agent')
en-cachaç-ado (adjective) 'drunk' (P -ado 'past participle')
en-cachaç-ar (verb) 'to become drunk' (P -ar 'infinitival
ending)
cachac-inha (noun) 'alcoholic drink' (P -inho/a 'diminutive')

(296) moleque (<Bantu cf. Kimbundu mu'leke 'urchin') 'urchin'

molec-ote (noun) 'young boy' (P -ote 'diminutive')
molec-a (noun) 'young girl' (P -a 'feminine')
molec-agem (noun) 'irresponsible act' (P -agem 'process')
 241

molec-ar (verb) 'to act like a boy' (P -ar 'infinitival ending')

molec-ada (noun) 'a band of rowdy boys' (P -ada 'colective')

In the religious realm, as is well known, the number of African borrowings

is remarkable. Below, are some of the most popular deities in Afro-
Brazilian religions:

(297) Exu 'devil' (cf. Yoruba eshu 'spirit')

(298) Xangô 'god of the atmosphere' (cf. Yoruba shango 'god of
thunder and lightning'
(299) Ifá 'palm tree' (cf. Yoruba Ifa 'god of divination')
(300) Iansam 'godess of the wind' (cf. Yoruba iya 'mother + sán 'to
thunder')
(301) Olorum 'supreme god' (cf. Yoruba Olorun 'the supreme God')
(302) Ogum 'god of war' (cf. Yoruba og˜u 'god of war and iron')
(303) Oxóssi 'god of the hunting' (cf. Yoruba orisha oshi 'one of the
national gods of the Yoruba'
(304) Oxalá 'the great spirit' (cf. Yoruba orinshala 'the great god')
(305) Oxum 'godess of fresh water, wealth and beauty' (cf. Yoruba
oshun 'goddess of the river of this name'
(306) Oxumarê 'the rainbow' (cf. Yoruba oshumare 'rainbow')
 242

The list below presents some very common words in BVP of African origin:

(307) abará 'bean roll' (cf. Yoruba abára)

(308) afofiê 'small flute' (cf. Yoruba afofíe)
(309) banguela 'without teeth' (cf. Bantu *-banga 'tusk')
(310) banzé 'tumult or brawl' (cf. Bantu mbanze 'uproar')
(311) cabaça 'a twin child who is the second to be born' (cf. Kikongo
kabasa )
(312) cafifa 'bad luck' (cf. Kimbundu kafife 'measles')
(313) camundongo 'small rat' (cf. Kimbundu diminutive prefix ka +
mundongo 'rat')
(314) dengue 'the stubborness of a child' (Kikongo ndenge 'child')
(315) engambelar 'to seduce, to trick' (cf. Kimbundu ngombo
'diviner or discoverer')
(316) fubá 'corn meal' (cf. Kimbundu fuba)
(317) inhame 'yam' (cf. Yoruba iyã)
(318) jongo 'a dance' (cf. Kimbundu jihungu)
(319) macambúzio 'sad' (cf. Kimbundu kamba)
(320) macumba 'witchcraft' (cf. Kimbundu mákumba 'a sound that
shocks or frightens')
(321) marimbondo 'wasp' (cf. Kimbundu plural prefix ma +
rimbondo 'wasp')
(322) quiabo 'okra'(cf. Kimbundu kiabu)
(323) vatapá 'typical Bahian dish' (cf. Yoruba vatápa)
 243

(324) xingar 'to curse' (cf. Kimbundu shinga)

(325) xodó 'courtship, flirtation' (cf. Yoruba sho-do 'Did you have
sex with her?)
(326) xuxu 'chayote squash' (cf. Nupe shu 'to make into a ball))
(327) zanzar 'to wander around' (cf. Ewe zanzola 'one who walks in
his sleep')

5.2.4 The West African pidgin/creole input

In almost every study of the origins of the creoles in the New World, there is
mention to a Portuguese-based pidgin or creole spoken in West Africa that
may have been the basis for the development of these creoles (cf. Granda
1978 and the references cited there). The following passage illustrates this
belief:

"...the process that, historically, gave origin to the several [Spanish-

based] creoles, which are not lexically Portuguese today, but which
had their origins in creoles (or pidgins) structurally and lexically
Portuguese".[My translation from the Spanish original, HRM]

(Granda 1978:505)

This Portuguese-based pidgin/creole is also held to have been the basis of

 244

the partially restructured vernacular varieties of Spanish spoken in areas of

predominantly black population in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic,
Cuba and the coastal area from western Colombia to Panama and northern
Ecuador (cf. Granda 1978:512-514 and Schwegler forthcoming c).
Concrete references to this Portuguese-based pidgin/creole can be found in
the well known book by the Jesuit Father Alonso Sandoval, dated 1627: De
instauranda Aethiopum salute (cf. Sandoval 1987). In one passage,
Sandoval refers to the speech of African slaves in the Americas (probably in
the area of Cartagena in Colombia, in which Palenquero creole is spoken to
this day) as follows:

...and those who we call creole and those who are born in São Tomé,
with the communication that they have had with such barbarious people
while stationed in São Tomé, most of these people communicate
among themselves through a very corrupted and broken kind of Portuguese
which they call São Tomé, so now we too understand, and speak with
blacks from different ethnic groups through our corrupt Spanish, as all the
blacks commonly do.

(cited in Granda 1978:355-356)

It is clear that Sandoval was referring to the creole spoken in the island of
São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea off the West coast of Africa; we can infer
that by then the language today called Sãotomense already existed as a
 245

stable creole. The importance of this information lies in the fact that the
island of São Tomé functioned as an entrepôt for the slave trade, which was
dominated by the Portuguese. If slaves were kept there long enough to learn
some of the creole spoken in São Tomé before being shipped to the
Portuguese and Spanish holdings in America, then when they arrived in the
New World they would already have had a code of communication closer to
the target language than their original native languages.

Evidence that at least some African slaves arrived in Brazil already able to
speak Sãotomense comes from Cortesão (1968:42) in which he mentions the
emigration from São Tomé to Brazil prompted by the Angolares rebellions:

At about this time São Tomé was in full decadence. The farmers,
whom the warring Angolares did not cease to disturb after 1575,
and the traders and ship-builders, continually persecuted at sea, had
from the end of the sixteenth century abandoned the island in large
numbers, most of them going to Brazil. The sugar industry declined
notably; of the many mills no more than ruins remained; and part of
the old and densely populated town now lay waste and deserted.

Further mention of the migration from São Tomé to Brazil is found in

Ambrósio (1984), who affirms that this pattern, which started at the end of
the sixteenth century, only ceased in the nineteenth century.
 246

It seems reasonable to assume that, whatever the West African pidgin and
creole input into the Brazilian linguistic situation, Sãotomense was likely to
have been a representative part of it. Coincidentally, the Sãotomense
substrate is composed of the language groups that would have played this
role in any Brazilian Portuguese, i.e., Kwa languages from the Bight of
Benin and Bantu languages from the Kongo (cf Ferraz 1979:10-11).

Among the many features that BVP shares with present day Sãotomense are
the following (cf. Mello 1992 for a thorough anlysis of these similarities):

Phonological features such as palatalization, monophthongization, and

syllable simplification:

(328) Palatalization
ST: 'sΩci
BVP: 'sΩrci
(cf. P "sorte" 'luck')

(329) Monophthongization
ST: 'm˜utu
BVP: 'm˜utu
(cf. P "muito" 'very')

(330) Apheresis
 247

ST: ka'ba
BVP: ka'ba
(cf. P "acabar" 'to finish')
In the morphosyntactic level there are the following common features
between BVP and ST:

Absence of definite articles:

(331) ST: Ferraz (1979:63)

ø pa'nela ku 'n-kΩmpla
pot that I-buy
'The pot that I bought'

(332) Helvécia dialect: Ferreira (1985:30)

kwãdu abri ø zanela
when (I)-openned window
'When I openned the window)
(cf. P "Quando abri a janela")

Relative clause pattern with a resumptive pronoun that refers back to an

object moved to the begining of the sentence:

(333) ST: Ferraz (1979:71)

ke m˜u ku nga vive n-e
 248

house me that I live in-it

'The house I live in'

(334) BVP: A casa que eu moro (nela)

the house that I live in-it
(cf. P "A casa em que moro")

Absence of reflexive pronouns:

(335) ST: Ferraz (1979:72)

e ple'de
he lose
'He got lost'

(336) BVP: ele perdeu

he lost
(cf. P "Ele se perdeu")

Disjunctive sentential double negation:

(337) ST: Ferraz (1979:68)

a na kuvi'da nõ fa
UNM NEG1 invite us NEG2

'We weren't invited'

 249

(338) BVP: nós num foi convidado não

we NEG1 were invited NEG2

(cf. P "Não fomos convidados")

Highlighter derived from que 'that':

(339) ST: (Ferraz &Valkoff 1975:25)

kene ku bi (ai) ni ke nõ oti?
who that come there in house our yesterday
'Who came here to our house yesterday?'

(340) BVP: Quem que veio na nossa casa ontem?

who that came in our house yesterday
(cf. P "Quem (é que) veio à nossa casa ontem?",
cf. section 4.4.4.3)

Reduplication and compounds:

(341) ST: Ferraz (1979:59)

e 'pEga-'pEga an'ka
he catch-catch crab
 250

'He regularly caught crabs'

(342) BVP: Amaral (1920 [1976:76])

ela veve só chorá-chorano
she lives only cry-crying
'She cries a lot'
(cf. P "Ela chora muito")

The use of preposition ni (< P em 'in') as a locative and directional (cf.

section 4.4.3):

(343) ST: Coelho (1880-1886 [1967:112])

ua dja mbá, piá bô, nglato, ni Plá-Gato
one day I-went for you ungrateful to beach-lizard
'One day I went, for you, ungrateful, to Lizard beach'

(344) BVP: Coelho (1880-1886 [1967:39])

Quando mozo vai ni rua
when lad goes in street
'When a young man goes out'
(cf. P "Quando um moço vai à rua")
 251

5.3 Language change

It is an established fact that all living languages change through time. The
grounds for disagreements emerge when scholars consider the causes for
these changes and the processes through which they take place [cf. Blount
and Sanches (1977), Langacker (1977), Lightfoot (1981), Breivik and Jahr
(1989), Baldi (1990) and Faarlund (1990)].

In the specific case of BVP it has been argued for about a century now that
the main driving force that has caused this language to grow apart from EP
for centuries is its isolation. By this is meant the geographical isolation of
Brazil in relation to Portugal, which has caused 'embryonary tendencies'
already in the Portuguese language (and Indo-European languages in general
and Romance languages in particular, for that matter [cf. Naro and Scherre
1993:8]) to develop further. Therefore, the language changes that shaped
contemporary BVP are claimed to be mostly internal, relegating to external
factors such as language contact a secondary role.

This assessment of BVP would in fact be correct had this language

developed in isolation from other languages or, at most, had it had a history
of low linguistic contact (cf. Trudgill 1989). However, the actual history of
 252

the language and Brazilian society suggests otherwise, given the pervasive
history of bilingualism among the several groups that populated Brazil
throughout the centuries, resulting in a high degree contact (cf. Cunha 1981).
Bearing this in mind, I will proceed to discuss the language internal and
external factors that have contributed to the present form of BVP.

Thomason and Kaufman (1988:9), referring to language change, point out

that

The main stimuli for change are drift, i.e., tendencies within the
language to change in certain ways as a result of structural
imbalances; dialect interference, both between stable, strongly
differentiated dialects and between weakly differentiated dialects
through the differential spread (in 'waves') of particular changes;
and foreign interference.

In the case of BVP it seems that all the above variables were at play, since
besides the normal transmission of Portuguese in Brazil, there were also
several European Portuguese dialects in contact with one another as well as
with African and Amerindian languages. Drift will be the first variable to be
analyzed below.
 253

5.3.1 Language drift

This process of language change is certainly the one that has been the most
studied and is therefore, better understood by linguists. Although Thomason
and Kaufman (idem) suggest that drift is motivated by structural imbalances
in a given language, this has hardly been proved, mostly because there is no
agreement as to what constitutes a structurally 'balanced' language. Any
drift in a language is motivated by its users and the purposes to which
language serves the best: communication and the signaling of social identity.

The most difficult issue a historical linguist deals with in trying to assess an
earlier stage of a given language's structure is not only the lack of sufficient
data but also the intrinsic variability in any linguistic community. The
researcher has to largely disregard idiolects and focus on the bigger picture
offered by a linguistic community, and therefore compromise enough to
conclude that the structures to be studied are representative of that particular
sample. However, it cannot be forgotten that the kinds of changes that are
being discussed here come about exactly because of language variability,
ultimately one form will predominate over others and will be considered by
the whole speech community as "the" form for that particular language.

Internal changes within a language can basically be classified either as sound

 254

changes or analogical changes (which are mostly related to morphological

leveling). It so happens that many times a sound change will prompt an
analogical change to follow. Sound changes can be of two types:

(a) a change in pronunciation which will not effect the phonemic inventory
of a language;

(b) a structural phonemic change that will cause a reorganization in the

number and distribution of phonemes in that language.

BVP and EP have some differences in their phonetic inventories. Over the
years some of the EP consonants were eliminated in BVP and many of the
vowels underwent changes. However, as it has already been shown, the
most drastic change in the phonological system of BVP compared to that of
EP is found in the structure of the syllable, that is, the tendency for BVP to
break up intrasyllabic consonantal clusters either through the deletion of
consonants or the addition of vowels. This phenomenon does not seem to
have been in progress in archaic EP from the data at our disposal. However,
perhaps the most dramatic phonological change in BVP that seems to have
its origin in EP is the denasalization of final unstressed nasalized
monophthongs, which will be discussed shortly.

As it was shown in section 5.2.1, several of the phonological processes

observed in BVP were already present in archaic Portuguese dialects, which
 255

gives BVP an archaic tone, especially its contemporary rural dialects,

according to authors such as Melo (1981).

The archaic EP written data consulted for this study revealed that there was
no deletion of word final -s, which is another striking feature of BVP. This
was also the conclusion arrived at by Guy (1981:134), who states that:

...deletion of final S has not, as far as we know, occurred at

previous stages of the history of Portuguese. Most sibilants which
were final in Latin, plus some which became final through deletion
of a following vowel in Vulgar Latin or Old Portuguese, are still
preserved today in the standard dialects of both Peninsular and
Brazilian Portuguese. However, loss of final S has occurred in other
areas of the Romance speaking world, including for example, French,
most of Eastern Romance, and (variably) in certain dialects of Spanish. 68

The deletion of final -s in BVP is very relevant because of its consequences

for the grammar of the language, since it relates to NP plural marking. As it
was shown in chapter four (section 4.3.1) there is a tendency in BVP for the
plural marker -s to be present only on the first element of the NP.
Interestingly, this parallels very closely the same pattern in modern spoken

68Of course at least the Caribbean Spanish dialects may have been restructured in this respect given their
contact history, which is very similar to that of BVP.
 256

French, in which determiners play a crucial role in marking plurality.

However, the rules that have led to the emergence of this feature in French
are purely phonological, while in BVP they are morphological as well.
French determiners have also lost their final -s in pronunciation (except in
liaison). It is the vowel of a French determiner that distinguishes number.

It was shown by Guy (1981) that final -s deletion in BVP is a process

conditioned by phonological factors such as stress and the following
segment. These constraints can better be appreciated in the following table
based on Guy's research on the urban BVP of Rio de Janeiro:

TABLE 7
Final -s deletion
 257

FACTORS PROBABILITY OF DELETION

CURRENT SYLLABLE STRESS
Stressed monosyllable .24
Stressed polysyllable .34
Unstressed .86
FOLLOWING SYLLABLE STRESS
Stressed .43
Unstressed .57
FOLLOWING CONTEXT
SEGMENT
Consonant .59
Vowel .41
Pause .50
CONSONANTAL VOICING
Voiced .59
Unvoiced .41
[Based on Guy (1981:156), table 5-11]

The other phonological process that has had a major impact in the
grammatical structure of BVP is denasalization. This process, however, can
be traced back to the very beginnings of the Portuguese language. Williams
(1962:92) contends that final -m was lost in vulgar Latin, and final -n in
early Portuguese. Guy (1981:201) claims that in early Portuguese, all
syllable final and word final -m's and -n's went through the process of first
nasalizing their preceding vowels and then ceasing to exist as a nasal
consonant in those environments.

The denasalization rule that is in effect in BVP is variable, and applies to

unstressed final monophthongs, which may originate through the reduction
 258

or contraction of diphthongs (eg. órgão -> órg˜u -> órgu 'organ'). This rule
seems to have been in effect in some archaic Portuguese dialects, as can be
inferred from examples such as birge (< P virgem [virg˜e˜y]) 'virgin' and
foro (< P foram [forã˜w]) '(they) went'.

The main grammatical effect this rule has on BVP is in the subject-verb
agreement rule, which may become opaque for some regular verbs in certain
tenses. For example, the verb comer 'to eat' in the present tense has the third
person plural form comem ['kom˜e˜y] '(they) eat' which in its denasalized
form becomes come. The denasalized form, therefore, coincides with the
third person singular form come '(she/he) eats'. Thus it is likely for the
subject pronoun to be used across the board to disambiguate the reference to
person.

However, this rule alone cannot account for the lack of person and number
marking of BVP verb forms, since denasalization is not the major effect
observed in the leveling of verb forms. On the contrary, the most dramatic
differences observed between BVP and standard Portuguese lie in the
irregular verb forms in which even the root changes for different persons.

In their discussion about the origins of BVP, Naro and Scherre (1993:444)
state that it is plausible to suppose that the initial source of the lack of
nominal concord [number agreement] was the phonological processes
already found in archaic EP, which also, according to them, affected
 259

subject/verb agreement.

I disagree with this assertion for reasons already pointed out in chapter four
(cf. section 4.2.2). Granted that the leveling of third person singular and
plural forms had already occurred in EP, for a very restricted class of verbs
(and even here, in only a few tenses), there is no evidence whatsoever that
points to this being the force that accounts for the dramatic simplification of
verb forms in BVP. Quite on the contrary, the few data there are reflecting
the speech of early Brazilians show that the third person singular form was
already being used as the unmarked form for verbs that do not belong to the
class referred to above. 69

The evidence against phonological drift in the reduction of both NP number

agreement and person/number subject/verb agreement is particularly strong
when we observe the irregular forms in these paradigms.

Lack of overt NP number agreement marking is completely independent of

final -s deletion in irregular plural forms such as the following: 70

69 Cf. Nos não coiesse esso gente

we NEG know these people
(cf. P Nós não conhecemos essa gente)

This example from Neto (1963:36) is taken from a Jesuit book portraying the Portuguese spoken by
Amerindians.

70 Cf. the same phenomena in Chota Spanish (Schwegler forthcoming c).

 260

SINGULARPLURAL
(345) BVP: o papel os papel (cf. P "os papéis")
the paper the papers

(346) BVP: o anão os anão (cf. P "os anões")

the dwarf the dwarfs

(347) BVP: o lar os lar (cf. P "os lares")

the home the homes

From the above forms and others like them, we can see that the standard
plural forms undergo a change of suffixal desinences and not only the
addition of a final -s; therefore, the maintenance of the same form for both
singular and plural in BVP indicates a morphological process as well as a
phonological one.

The combination of phonological and morphological processes at play can

be seen in examples such as the ones below:

SINGULARPLURAL
(348) BVP: o anãozinho os anãozinho (cf. P "os anõezinhos")
the little dwarf the little dwarfs
 261

(349) BVP: o anzolzinho os anzolzinho (cf P "os anzoizinhos")

the little hook the little hooks

In (348) and (349) the BVP plural forms lack both the desinential change in
the root word and the final suffixal -s indicating of plurality. Therefore there
is evidence that morphological and phonological processes interact in
producing the BVP plural forms. This is further confirmed by BVP forms
such as os anãozinhos, in which the final -s plural marking is present but the
root form is maintained.

As for subject/verb agreement, the counterevidence for simple phonological

drift is provided by the large number of irregular forms such as the
following:

(350) nós foi (cf. P "nós fomos")

we went

(351) eles é (cf. P "eles são)

they are

In (350) and (351) a morphological rule is at play, in which the third person
singular forms foi 'went' and é 'is' are chosen as the unmarked forms used for
all persons except the first singular for most BVP dialects.
 262

In some BVP dialects, however, there is evidence of a phonological rule at

work, since forms such as the ones below are found:

(352) nós fomu (cf. P "nós fomos")

we went

(353) eles foru (cf. P "eles foram")

they went

In (352) final -s was deleted and in (353) the denasalization rule was
applied; therefore, phonological rules were at play. The overall evidence,
therefore, points to a combination of phonological and morphological factors
in the explanation of BVP forms; drift by itself cannot account for the
current forms found in the language.

Moving now to morphosyntactic drift, it was observed in section 5.2.1 that

some of the grammatical features that set BVP apart from contemporary EP
dialects were already manifested in archaic EP. These features seem to have
dropped out of EP through standardization but to have spread in BVP.
Among these are the following: the use of the verb ter 'to have' as an
impersonal existential verb instead of the standard verb haver 'there is/are';
the use of the preposition em 'in' with both locative and directional
meanings; some uses of the preposition para 'to' instead of a 'to'; and active
 263

sentences with indefinite subjects in place of passive constructions.

As for verb tenses, such as the use of the imperfect for the conditional or the
simple present for the simple future, these have continued on into EP and are
found in other languages as well, suggesting a universal tendency towards
tense simplification.

Other phenomena, however, such as the use of subject pronouns in place of

object ones (cf. section 4.3.5) and relative constructions with resumptive
pronouns (cf. section 4.4.4.4) are not so transparent as to their origin.
Despite their sporadic presence in the archaic Portuguese data consulted for
this study, their use seems to have been confined to emphasis only, raising
the question as to why they would become the most common patterns in
BVP.

One theory is the possible use of emphatic constructions by the Portuguese

when addressing non-Portuguese speakers as a means of facilitating
understanding. These forms, throughout time, would have become
generalized to normal use, losing their special emphatic tone. As will be
see in section (5.3.3), however, a combination of factors is more likely to
have contributed to the establishment of these constructions in BVP.

From the above discussion it is clear that drift did play an important role in
the formation of some of the distinctive features of contemporary BVP.
 264

These features contribute to what has been called in the literature 'the
conservative character' of BVP. In the following two sections, other factors
that interacted in the origination of BVP will be discussed.

5.3.2 Dialect leveling

The phenomenon known as dialect leveling has been observed to occur in

situations of large scale migration, such as occurred with the Portuguese
during the centuries of Brazil's colonization (cf. Hock 1986:470). 71

Dialect leveling has been compared to koiné formation in that both processes
are defined by the deregionalization of regional dialects or languages,
giving rise to a language variety that serves as a vehicle for supra-regional
communication.

Portugal is typical of European countries in that despite its small

geographical size it has distinct regional dialects, in much the same way as
England. It is possible to say that both Brazil and the United States present
much more dialectal homogeneity despite their vast size compared to the
countries that colonized them.

71 For a similar phenomenon in Indo-Portuguese cf. Dalgado (1900 )and (1922).

 265

This phenomenon is quite well understood, given the historical processes

involved. While Portugal has a long history of territorial conquests and
invasions, the Portuguese language in Brazil is only five hundred years old.
In the Middle Ages, between the sixth and twelfth centuries, several local
Hispanic-Romance dialects grew out of local Hispanic vulgar Latin. These
dialects later evolved into not only different regional dialects but also
different Iberian languages, eg. Galician (cf. Melo 1981:91).72

In the twelfth century Portugal became independent and the language which
was called Galician-Portuguese spread south of the Minho River,
influencing the regional languages that ultimately developed into Portuguese
dialects. In the sixteenth century, when the colonization of Brazil started,
there were already several well established Portuguese dialects in Portugal.
With the massive Portuguese migration to Brazil, speakers of different
dialects who used to live far apart in their homeland, suddenly started living
in close contact. The former dialectal loyalties and patterns of
communication, thus, became less important, and the settlers found
themselves in a new situation in which communication was necessary.

According to Hock (1986:470) in these circumstances

72 The scarcity of population movements in Portugal is another important factor in the maintenance of
different dialects.
 266

...changes which eliminate excessive differences between different

speakers are highly favored, since they make communication and
interaction easier. The result is a dialectally much more homogeneous
language. The effects of migration, thus, may in some ways be similar to
the elimination of dialect differences brought about by expansion of a
supra-regional, standard language at the expense of local dialects.

There are three main dialectal areas in Portugal: the North, the Center and
the South (cf. Cintra 1983:145). The southern dialects (e.g. Alantejo) have
had a considerable degree of prestige for about five centuries; the official
standard dialect of Lisbon and Coimbra belongs to this group. Both Melo
(1981) and Cintra (1983) point out that the majority of those who left
Portugal for Brazil were from the north. However, BVP resembles southern
dialects more than it does the northern, except for the monophthongization
of [ei] -> [e] and [ou] -> [o] (cf. Cintra 1983:33). This fact may be due to
the northern Portuguese settlers being bidialectal before migrating, knowing,
besides their own dialect, the prestige vernacular spoken with the accent of
their northern dialects.

The overall effect of the leveling of Portuguese dialects in Brazil was the
development of an authentic Brazilian Portuguese dialect, which does not
have the marked differences of EP dialects and resembles a 'relic area' in that
it did not undergo the innovations that swept Portugal after the bulk of
 267

migration to Brazil had occurred (cf. Williams 1962).

5.3.3 Language contact

This section will examine the different ways in which the languages spoken
in colonial Brazil may have been affected by mutual contact, ultimately
leading to language death (in the case of African and most Amerindian
languages) and the firm establishment of BVP.

The first point that must be noted in the discussion of language contact
phenomena is that for there to be any type of transfer of features across
language boundaries, the speakers of these languages must have some
degree of bilingualism (cf. Weinreich 1964). 73 The extent and types of
exchange that occur in language contact environments depend largely on the
social and cultural relations between the communities involved.

As we have already seen, during the colonization of Brazil, despite the

numeric superiority of peoples other than the Portuguese, the latter always
kept political, administrative and economic control of the country. The
pressure for both Africans and Amerindians to acquire Portuguese was
intense although it varied according to the official policies of the State.

73 I will refer loosely to bilingualism, meaning both bilingualism proper and multilingualism.
 268

However, multilingualism was not tolerated for long, as attested by the

decrees to extinguish Língua Geral (cf. Silva Neto 1963:59).

Despite official policies, however, it seems that in the case of Brazil, the
interplay between the different population groups was more important for
the linguistic outcome of BVP. The inter-group dynamics ultimately
determined the current shape of BVP.

On strictly linguistic grounds, some of the conditioning factors in action in

language contact situations should be addressed. First, a basic distinction
must be made between normal transmission and imperfect transmission.
The former preserves a language genetically, even if there are changes
prompted by language contact. The latter, however, results in the genesis of
new, mixed languages, as it is the case with creoles. Although changes
prompted by light language contact may resemble some features present in
creoles, the linguistic processes that are involved in these two situations
have very basic differences, since a break in transmission leads to the
emergence of a radically restructured linguistic system that cannot be fully
traced back to any particular ancestral parent language.

According to Thomason and Kaufman (1988), changes due to language

contact can occur at any and all levels of a linguistic system, since there
seems not to be any structural constraint that effectively regulates what
changes a certain language may or may not undergo. In their discussion of
 269

contact-induced linguistic changes, Thomason and Kaufman (idem)

conclude that none of the constraints proposed in the literature, such as
typological, implicational universal, or constraints based on naturalness are
applicable in this context. From their studies they concluded that 'it is the
sociohistory of its speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is
the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact'
(ibid.:35). Although I agree with Thomason and Kaufman (1988) on the
importance of the speakers sociohistory in the formation of a given
language, it is more likely that the above mentioned factors did play an
important role in the context of colonial Brazil. However, it is possible that
purely grammatical factors were sometimes overridden by social factors.
With these assumptions in mind, I will proceed with the discussion of
contact-induced changes in the formation of BVP.

As pointed out in section 5.1, there are different processes that account for
language contact phenomena; namely borrowing, shift, pidginization/
creolization. The most radical process among those is certainly creolization,
in which normal transmission is severed, prompting the genesis of a new
language to occur [cf. Kay and Sankoff (1974), DeCamp and Hancock
(1974), Clough (1976), Givón (1979), Bickerton (1989), Mühlhäusler
(1989), Pütz and Dirven (1989), Byrne and Holm (1993)]. On the other
hand, borrowing and shift occur in environments in which there are varying
degrees of bilingualism.
 270

Before we proceed, a clarification of the labeling of language varieties used

in this section and their association to ethnic groups is needed. All of the
Amerindian languages spoken in Brazil at the time of discovery are not
known. What is available to us is the fact that there was a predominance of
Tupi languages spoken on the coast and that the Tupi-based koiné Língua
Geral was used among Indians and in their dealings with the Portuguese.

The majority of the first Portuguese colonizers in Brazil spoke continental

vernacular dialects and a few educated officials, priests and land owners
probably also spoke a prestigious variety of Portuguese. It has been
suggested that speakers of vernacular European Portuguese leveled their
speech to a language form to avoid any outstanding regional features and
used more of the shared characteristics based as much as possible on what
these speakers perceived as being the prestigious Portuguese variety at the
time. This process clearly would have started the process of distancing the
Portuguese spoken in Brazil from that spoken in Portugal. It is also very
likely that the Portuguese who lived in rural areas also learned a Portuguese-
based pidgin spoken by the newly arrived African slaves in order to
communicate with them. Those Portuguese who lived in areas in which
Amerindians predominated (such as the state known as São Paulo today)
spoke Língua Geral in addition to their Portuguese dialects. Their children,
however, spoke Língua Geral natively.

The African-born slaves spoke their native languages (which in most cases
 271

were Bantu and Kwa languages), although a percentage of slaves arriving

via São Tomé, spoke the Portuguese-based creole of that island. The former,
known as boçais in Brazil, probably spoke a Portuguese-based pidgin,
which they either learned in coastal West Africa in the slave depots, during
their crossing of the Atlantic aboard slave ships, or upon arrival in the
Brazilian plantations and mines. This pidgin was used for communication
among the slaves and with the whites; therefore, the whites in these areas
had to know this pidgin as well.

Second-generation slaves would probably learn their parents' native

languages at first and the pidgin as well. However, Brazilian-born slave
children were raised with the white children, and therefore had more
exposure to the Portuguese that the latter spoke natively, which in all
probability was heavily influenced by Africanisms since it had been learned
not only from their white parents but also from their caretakers, who were
slave women. Domestic slaves also had more exposure to the Portuguese
spoken by whites; therefore, their Portuguese would have had fewer pidgin
features than that spoken by field slaves. As the number of Brazilian-born
slaves grew, they were given preference in domestic work because they were
perceived as being "more intelligent" and as speaking a "better" Portuguese
than the boçais.

As time progressed, all the Brazilian-born slaves spoke their own varieties of
Portuguese natively. These were not creoles, but had substrate features and
 272

second-language learning errors carried over from the speech of the

preceding generations. On the other hand, the rural white population had
extensive dealings with the slaves, and as already mentioned, in many cases
had slave speech as part of their native language model. Evidently, with
time, the Portuguese dialects spoken by the first generations of colonizers
became the Portuguese spoken by the white children who grew up with
slaves, which is the language variety called BVP in this dissertation. In all
likelihood these children were multidialectal, being able to adjust their
speech to either that of their slave peers ( possibly a more restructured form
of BVP), that of their parents (a less restructured form of BVP) or later that
of their teachers (a prestigious variety of Portuguese learned through formal
education).

In all likelihood, by the end of the seventeenth century, there was already a
continuum of varieties of the Portuguese language in Brazil that could be
labeled BVP. At the most restructured end of this continuum was the speech
of African-born slaves who had lived a sufficiently long period of time in
Brazil to learn BVP as a second language. In the middle, there was the
speech of Brazilian-born field and mine slaves. At the least restructured
end, was the speech of domestic slaves and rural whites.

The relative uniformity of the grammatical features of the Brazilian

vernacular dialects can be accounted for by dialect leveling. In the history
of Brazil, internal migrations are well documented. These population
 273

movements started with the Bandeirantes seeking gold and precious stones,
and continued with merchants and their caravans crossing large portions of
the Brazilian territory selling goods. Some economic activities, such as
cattle raising, also favored population movements. In addition to this, the
moving of large numbers of slaves from one region of the country to another
due to changes in economic activities is also well documented. A good
example of this would be the dislocation of thousands of slaves from the
sugar-growing areas in northeastern Brazil to the southeastern region when
gold was discovered. Eventually, with the decrease of mining activities in
the southeastern region, slaves were moved again to the northeast where
sugar production underwent a revival. However, in all likelihood the largest
population movement in Brazilian history occurred after the abolition of
slavery when there was a sudden movement of the rural population, mostly
ex-slaves, to the cities. This trend of migration from the rural areas to the
urban centers continues even today.

It is also worth noting that the European Portuguese input decreased as time
went by, due to the fact that little by little the number of Portuguese
immigrants to Brazil decreased while the Brazilian population increased. If
at first the Portuguese were the land owners and holders of every means of
production in Brazil, soon enough their children came to consider
themselves Brazilians, and were therefore more prone to identify with a
language variety different from that of their Portuguese ancestors. In
addition to the increase in the Brazilian population with the arrival of
 274

African slaves (whose children were also Brazilians), the group which
became the predominant one in Brazil was the mixed population, usually the
children of white men with black women. This group most certainly
identified strongly with Brazil, since they were neither totally Portuguese
nor African in origin. Part of their badge of social identity was their
language, called BVP here.

At this point, the question to be posed is this: what were the contact
processes at play in the formation of BVP?

Given what is known about the sociohistory of BVP, the following

hypothesis can be formulated: 74

(a) there was at least partial restructuring at certain specific areas in

colonial Brazil (cf. Helvécia Portuguese), such as plantation sites and
mining areas, given the fact that the slave population in these areas,
at least at first, had little access to a non-restructured Portuguese
model; these varieties in the course of time, with the increase in the
number of Brazilian-born slaves, were modified towards a less
restructured form due to contact with the, by then formed, rural
BVP, therefore undergoing a decreolization process;

74 For a similar approach to Black English Vernacular cf. Stewart (1962), (1967), (1968), (1969a) and
(1969b).
 275

(b) there was language shift from one generation to the next for
massive numbers of slaves whose first languages were either African
languages or a West-African creole; these slaves were exposed to EP
vernacular varieties at first, and due to lack of sufficiently available
models, acquired it imperfectly. By the end of the seventeenth century
BVP was already formed, serving as a target language for newly arrived
slaves and a mother tongue for Brazilian-born slaves;

(c) There was lexical borrowing from African and Amerindian

languages by speakers of both dialectal and prestigious EP in the
early colonial time (until the eighteenth century); it is also likely that
some grammatical features were borrowed from the Portuguese-
based creoles of West Africa (cf. Holm 1991). After the eighteenth
century, speakers of BVP continued borrowing lexical items from
African languages, up until the death of these languages in Brazil;

The three processes were interactive and coexisted during the Brazilian
colonial period. The evidence that these processes took place is the
following:

(a) although there are no samples of previously existing creoles in Brazil,

the recently found dialect of Helvécia has provided linguistic-trace
evidence of decreolization (cf. Baxter forthcoming);
 276

(b) the references made to the speech of blacks, mulattos and people
belonging to the lower social strata in Brazilian society in the
literature and the imitation samples in novels show that at least
partially restructured Portuguese was spoken early on in Brazil;

(c) the large number of lexical items of African and Amerindian origin
in today's Brazilian Portuguese in general provide evidence for close
language contact, as do the many grammatical features considered
non-standard in the speech of even educated Brazilians (cf. Azevedo
1989), despite the latter not being recognized as having African or
Amerindian origin (cf. Melo 1981).

Of the four contact-induced processes mentioned above, interference

through language shift seems to have been the one that was most important
in the formation of BVP. The reasons for this are mainly demographic: the
majority of the population in Brazil during the colonial period was always
made up of blacks, Indians and people of mixed ancestry. The slaves
arriving from Africa had to communicate among themselves and with all
those people who affected their lives, including overseers, priests and
merchants. It is likely that for the majority of African-born slaves the
contact language was a pidgin at first. However, Brazilian-born slaves
would have acquired whatever variety of Portuguese that was available to
them natively, albeit with restricted exposure to it depending on their
 277

particular situation, i.e., house slaves had much more contact with
Portuguese speakers throughout their lives than field slaves. However, in
colonial times it was common for the white children to be brought up by
slave women and to play with slave children, and in all probability all of
these children, despite the color of their skin, spoke the same variety of
Portuguese natively. As a result of this, over the years, the Portuguese
spoken even by whites in rural areas underwent a certain degree of
restructuring, and this was the Portuguese model spoken by overseers on
plantations and mines, plantation owners and their families and workers. The
upper-class whites in rural areas would only later in life, through schooling,
acquire the prestigious Portuguese variety.

The Portuguese linguistic model was more readily available for slaves in
urban than rural areas. However, even on a plantation, there was a hierarchy
among slaves; those working in the owner's home had closer contact with his
family and greater access to the target language. Of course, after slaves
were born in Brazil, and not just brought from Africa, the locally born slave
population spoke BVP natively, which provided a model of the target
language for newly arrived slaves, shifting the contact language for new
arrivals from a pidgin to the local Portuguese vernacular. BVP was also the
first language of the mixed population, who eventually became the majority
of the Brazilian population, and of poor whites who lived in rural areas.

Many of the Brazilian Portuguese features referred to in the literature as

 278

'non-standard' in reality apparently correspond to features transferred from

African substrate languages at the time that their speakers were learning
Portuguese. This process is not uncommon and is extensively discussed in
Thomason and Kaufman (1988), who assert that 'in interference through
shift, if there is phonological interference there is sure to be some syntactic
interference as well, and vice versa' (ibid.: 60). These transferred features
became integral parts of the linguistic system today known as BVP. Of
course, over the centuries this language has been evolving and naturally also
developed features that have resulted from its own internal changes and
grammaticalization processes ( cf. Traugott and Heine 1991 and Hopper and
Traugott 1993).

Among the most outstanding features of BVP that were acquired through
language shift are the morphological patterns of pluralization in the NP and
of person in the verb paradigms. As has already been pointed out,
pluralization is usually encoded in the NP through the marking of pre-
nuclear determiners, and the verb paradigms are reduced to a marked form
for the first person singular only and an unmarked form based on the
standard third person singular for all the other persons, shifting the
indication of person to required subject pronouns.

These two features came into BVP partly as interference from substrate
languages and partly as the universal tendency in adult second language
 279

acquisition to lexicalize grammatical information 75 - perhaps converging

with the historical tendency within Portuguese towards the reduction of
inflectional morphology (cf. Weinreich 1964). It is even likely that initially
there was no marking for plurality in the NP and only one form for verbal
paradigms. However, after longer contact with Portuguese speakers, the
speakers of the then forming BVP probably began using minimally marked
forms, such as plural determiners and a contrasting verb form for the first
person singular. Recent studies show that contact with standard BP and
exposure to formal education eventually change the speech of BVP speakers
into intermediary dialects closer to standard Portuguese (cf. Bortoni-
Ricardo 1985 and Macedo 1996), in which there is a higher percentage of
marking of the nucleus of the SN and an increased number of forms in
verbal paradigms. 76

The patterns of relative clauses, passive voice constructions, double

sentential negation and the monomorphism of personal pronouns in BVP
also point towards substratum transfer in the acquisition of Portuguese in
Brazil, given that these were both Bantu and Kwa. Another interpretation
for these phenomena is provided by Holm (1991) who views them as a result
of semi-creolization, achieved through the borrowing of grammatical

75 In this interpretation the morphological encoding of plurality across the NP is not acquired and plurality
is instead lexicalized as a marked determiner.

76 It is relevant that these same patterns are present in the BVP spoken by contemporary Amerindians
learning it as a second language in the process of language shift (cf. Macedo 1996).
 280

features when a creole (Sãotomense) is in contact with a non-creole

language (vernacular European Portuguese in early colonial Brazil) and
partial restructuring. However, as has been pointed out in section 5.1.2.4,
semi-creolization is a particular case of the broader processes of language
shift and borrowing. In this study, I have proposed that partial restructuring
may be achieved through incomplete language shift, whereby features of
substrate languages may be transferred into the target language due to
insufficient models of the latter. On the other hand, borrowing of creole
features (e.g., double predicate negation) is a sub-set of the larger set of
borrowed features, which includes a vast number of lexical items from
Amerindian languages as well as some grammatical features (cf. section
5.2.2). 77

As has already been pointed out in section 4.2, among the features in the
phonological structure of BVP that seem to have resulted from substratum
interference are the consonant-vowel syllable pattern and certain prosodic
features which have rendered the language to sound as if 'it were being
"sung"' by some scholars (cf. Melo 1981). The later, however, have not
been studied.

77 Schwegler (forthcoming c) analyzing similar phenomena in nonstandard Caribbean and Chota Spanish
(Ecuatorian Highlands) argues for an Afro-Portuguese pidgin or creole origin for these features, therefore
defending the monogenesis theory, which proposes a common substratal origin for several of the New
World's creoles and nonstandard dialects.
 281

A word about markedness and typological similarity between Portuguese

and the substrata languages is in order here. In the process of acquisition of
a second language these two factors play an important role, specially in a
context such as the colonial Brazilian one, in which models of the target
language were not as available as it is desirable for perfect second language
learning. The features that have been discussed in this study as foreign to
the Portuguese linguistic system do not necessarily have to exist in precisely
that form in the languages I have called the substrata in this context, since in
the process of learning a second language, learners may stop short of
acquiring a perfect knowledge of a target language structure and settle for
stages called 'interlanguages' in which maximally simplified structures are
adopted. In this particular case, markedness plays a crucial role, since
universally marked structures are avoided on all linguistic grounds, and
unmarked ones are privileged (cf. Selinker 1972). This would be the case,
for instance, of the greatly simplified morphological structure of verbal
paradigms. The same would also be true of the simplified pattern of syllable
structure in BVP, in which complex consonantal clusters are avoided and
substituted by the simpler consonant-vowel structure.

As for typological similarity, this factor can account for apparent

convergences between the target language and the substrata. In this case,
sometimes an apparent similarity between the two can account for the
reinterpretation of some aspect of the target language structure. Some of the
features in BVP seem to fall in this category, as for example, the use of the
 282

preposition em 'in' (and its variants, including ni) with locative and
directional functions. The same is true for the use of que 'that' as a
highlighter (in which the emphatic Portuguese construction que é que 'what
is that' is reinterpreted as, for example, [wh...highlighter]FOCUS), given the
fact that highlighter particles are common in the African substrate. There
also seems to have been convergence in the vocalic system of BVP, in
which the archaic Portuguese system largely coincided with that of the
substrate languages (remaining quite different from the changes that have
since occurred in contemporary EP).

Finally, it is important to note that although it is my contention that a large

percentage of speakers of African languages may have shifted to Portuguese
within a generation, the continued contact between BVP and standard BP
has affected both dialects, since BVP has changed in the direction of more
standard-like structures, and on the other hand, standard BP has borrowed
features from BVP.

5.4 Summary

In this chapter the possible sources for the divergent features between BVP
and standard BP were discussed . A dynamic model of language change was
 283

proposed, in which three main mechanisms had an interactive role, namely,

language internal changes, dialect leveling and language contact processes.

It was observed that some of the features today present in BVP were already
manifested, albeit in minor functional contexts, in archaic Portuguese
accounting for internal tendencies of the Portuguese language that developed
in Brazil but not in Portugal. This fact may have been due to a heavier
pressure on vernacular speakers in Portugal to change certain features of
their speech towards a more prestigious variety than that observed in
colonial Brazil. It would certainly be impossible to "correct" the speech of
millions of Brazilians who were not exposed to schooling at all and who had
no hopes of ascending the social ladder.

The leveling of European Portuguese dialects in colonial Brazil eliminated

the most marked differences among them, providing a more homogeneous
target language model for the large number of Amerindians, Africans and
their descendants who learned Portuguese.

Finally, regarding language contact processes, again we faced interactive,

dynamic mechanisms. Among these are language borrowing,
pidginization/creolization and imperfect language shift. It was proposed that
creolization and partial restructuring did not occur throughout colonial
Brazil, but mainly in isolated areas which favored these processes; and that
later decreolization through contact with BP occurred. In most of settled
 284

Brazil, the likeliest scenario was a process of imperfect language shift to

Portuguese by the African and Amerindian populations and their
descendants. This shift led to the establishment of BVP as the predominant
dialect of Portuguese. However, as the shift was taking place, substratum
structural features and interlanguage patterns were transferred to the target
language, becoming fossilized.

It is also my interpretation that certain features of the substratum languages

were eventually transferred into general Brazilian Portuguese. This process
not only increased that language's lexicon with a large number of new
concepts and cultural items introduced by speakers of Amerindian and
African languages, but also facilitated the introduction of some vernacular
grammatical features into the standard.

Therefore I conclude that BVP resulted not from any single language change
process, but rather from the convergence of many. These processes,
however, were generally affected by socio-linguistic factors and ultimately
reflect the power structure of colonial Brazil, in which the minority
linguistic group, the Portuguese, provided the basic target language model
for all other linguistic groups.
 285

CHAPTER 6
 286

CONCLUSION

In this dissertation the linguistic factors and processes that led to the
formation of BVP have been analyzed .

In chapter one the factors that played a role in the formation of BVP were
examined. Such processes are the following: large-scale Portuguese
immigration to Brazil, large-scale forced African immigration to Brazil, the
enslavement of Amerindians and Africans by the Portuguese minority,
multiple ethnic groups and languages in contact, the isolation of archaic
European Portuguese dialects in colonial Brazil and contact among regional
European dialects brought to the New World.

There was also a discussion of present-day BVP varieties that have

contributed to the understanding of this language's origins, and a brief
comparison of BVP and some varieties of nonstandard American Spanish .

Chapter two was an overview of the linguistic literature on BVP, including

the many different approaches to its genesis that have been proposed over the
last one hundred years.
 287

In chapter three, the social history of BVP's speakers was discussed to see
what light demographic information would cast on the evolution of BVP,
which was divided into three major periods during which social-economic
variables shifted in Brazil. It was established that whites, originally the only
native speakers of Portuguese, have always been a minority throughout
Brazil's history. This fact played a major role in the types of developments
undergone by Portuguese in Brazil, since this language was initially learned
as a second language by a large percentage of the population, i.e. Indians and
Africans, and only later was acquired as a first language by these populations
descendants.

In chapter four the distinguishing features of BVP were discussed, and

compared to similar features in archaic Portuguese as well as Portuguese-
based creoles. It was shown that these distinguishing features are pervasive
on both the lexical and the grammatical levels of BVP, clearly setting it apart
from both SBP and EP.

Chapter five examines and contrasts the linguistic processes likely to have
led to the formation of BVP, leading to the conclusion that both language
internal processes (e.g. drift), and language external processes (e.g. contact
phenomena such as borrowing and shift) interacted and played important
roles. It was shown that some of BVP's features clearly come from just one
source, but others seem to have resulted from converging influences.
 288

The findings in this dissertation have shed light on several linguistic

processes. It was found that despite the lack of conclusive evidence for prior
creolization, BVP has features which have led us to hypothesize some degree
of language restructuring. Among the most salient features indicative of
restructuring are the following: a general tendency towards the use of
periphrastic constructions instead of synthetic ones, reduced NP number
agreement, reduced verbal inflections, innovation in relativization and
passivization strategies, tendency towards leftward topicalization and zero
anaphors, monomorphism in personal pronouns, innovations in prepositional
use and phonotactic patterns, and sentential double negation. All of these
features indicate some degree of simplification and reformulation of the
linguistic input system, European Portuguese.

Restructuring is especially salient in periphrastic constructions substituting

bound morphology, e.g. the use of overt subject pronouns instead of person-
number inflexional morphology on verb forms. This distinguishing feature
of BVP has emerged as a result of grammaticalization processes prompted by
language contact phenomena such as reanalysis and analogical rules, brought
about by the fossilization of incomplete second-language acquisition
interlanguage stages.

This study has established that many factors converged in the genesis of
BVP; however, it was primarily the general context of bilingualism and
 289

language shift prompted by the adoption of Portuguese for millions of

Africans and Amerindians, which led to the gradual development of BVP
through massive transfers from their native languages. This fact was
undoubtedly caused by inadequate access to the full version of the target
language, due to factors such as: the limited contact between the indigenous
and African populations of Brazil with the Portuguese colonizers; the lack of
formal institutions such as schools, to teach the target language; and limited
motivation to adopt the full version of the target language given the general
socio-economic oppression and the absence of much social mobility in
colonial Brazilian society.

Although many questions remain to be answered, it is hoped that this study

will contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic processes involved
in the genesis of this language variety in particular, and of partially
restructured languages in general.

APPENDIX

Sample of database used in this dissertation

1. Speech of the black community of João Ramalho (Spera and Ribeiro

 290

1989:152)

About falling stars:

"aquela estela...candu uma moça vai fugi... o então tá pa discasá um
that star....when a maid goes elope...or even is to divorce a

casali,
couple

'That star... when a maid runs way or a couple is going to divorce,'

(cf. SBP: "that star...quando uma moça vai fugir, ou então um casal vai
separar-se,")

ela fica perto da l˜ua...uma mais pa riba, otra mais pá basso...

it stays near of-the moon...one more for above, another more for below....
'it appears near the moon...one is placed above, and the other below...'
(cf. SBP: " ela fica perto da lua... uma mais para cima, a outra mais para
baixo...")

então devi ficá um viúvu... o casali bem casadu..."

then should stay one widower... the couple well married...
'so one should become a widower, and the couple should remain married...'
(cf. SBP: "então um ficará viúvo, e o casal deve permanecer bem casado...")
 291

About the devil:

"nu meio tem a parte du bichinhu...um bichu du outru
in-the middle has the part of-the beast-DIM ... a beast of-the other

mundu...
world
'in the middle is the devil's part... a devil from another world'
(cf. SBP: "no meio há a parte do diabo... um diabo do outro mundo")

Num podi falá nomi...só fala u bichinhu..."

NEG can say name... only say the beast-DIM
'Its name can't be said.... One can only say the little beast'
(cf. SBP: "Não se pode falar o nome dele... só se pode dizer o bichinho")

About thunderbolt:
"issu qui é u raru...candu eli dá... uma machadinha...
this that is the rare... when he gives... a axe-DIM ...
'This is what is strange....when it gives... a little axe'
(cf. SBP: Isso é que é estranho... quando ela dá...uma machadinha")

eli cai numa arvi...Candu eli (...)

he falls in-a tree... when he
'it falls in a tree... when it (...)'
 292

(cf. SBP: "ele cai numa árvore...quando ele (...)")

torna a levantá, sobi pra cima...Tem dois nomi, né?

become to stand, climb up to above...has two names, NEG-is?
'It stands up again, goes up... It has two names, right?'
(cf. SBP: " Torna a se levantar, sobe...Tem dois nomes, não é?")

É uma machadinha que nem cê tira lenha neli...

Is a axe-DIM that like you take wood in-it
'It is a little axe, just like the ones you cut wood with'
(cf. SBP: "É uma machadinha, como aquelas com que se corta madeira")

Eli tem dois nomi... raiu... ou curiscu (...)

He has two names...thunderbold or curiscu
'It has two names...thunderbold or corisco'
(cf. SBP: " Ele tem dois nomes: raio ou corisco")

Relampa nu céu i eli vem diretu... chega aqui,

thunderbolts in-the sky and he comes directly... arrives here,
'There is a thunderbolt in the sky and it comes directly...comes here'
(cf SBP: "Relampeja no céu e ele vem direto...chega aqui")

cai num pau e fica prá dentru (...) nu chão...

 293

falls in-a wood and stays for inside (...) in-the ground...
'It falls in a piece of wood and stays inside (...) in the ground...'
(cf. SBP: "Cai num pau e fica dentro dele (...) no chão")

Quandu relampa, levanta pra cima otra veis."

when thunderbolts, goes up for above another turn
'When there is a thunderbold, it goes up again'
(cf. SBP: "Quando relampeja, sobe outra vez")

2. Speech of the black community of Ribeira Valley (Careno 1992)

1- us crenti começa a adjudá co'as coisa pr' acreditá

the protestants start to help with-the-PL thing-SING for believe
'The protestants start helping people aroun to gain their trust'
(cf. SBP: "Os crentes começam a ajudar as pessoas para ganharem
confiança")
i u povu vão naquela bobera
and the people go-3PL in-that foolishness
'and people fall for it'
(cf. SBP: "e as pessoas se deixam enganar")

2- essas...cunversa nossa qui nóis tem

these... conversation-SING ours that we have-3 SING
 294

'These talks we have'

(cf. SBP: "Essas nossas conversas que temos")

pur aqui tudu fica aqui memu

for here all stay here even
'around here remain here'
(cf. SBP: " por aqui, permanecem por aqui mesmo")

3- us indígenu qui diz passaru pur aqui...

the-PL Indian-SING that say passed by here
'The Indians that passed by here'
(cf. SBP: " Os indígenas que passaram por aqui")

pareceu naquele riuzinhu

appeared in-that river-DIM
'showed up in that creek'
(cf. SBP: "apareceram naquele riozinho")

4- ah era us pai qui tratava us casamentu

ah was the-PL parent-SING that arranged the-PL marriage-SING
'Ah, it was the parents who arranged the marriages'
(cf. SBP: "Ah, eram os pais que arranjavam os casamentos")

mai us noivu num si cunhiciam

 295

but the-Pl engaded-SING NEG REF knew

'but the bride and groom didn't known each other'
(cf. SBP: "mas os noivos não se conheciam")

5- meiu dus matu... aquela mala di viradu nas costa

middle of-the-PL wood-SING... that suitcase of turned in-the-PL back-SING
'In the middle of the woods... with that suitcase in the back'
(cf. SBP: " No meio do mato... com aquela mala nas costas")

6- mai eli agora peguemu a assinatura dus episódii dus

but he now got-1PL the signature of-the-PL episode of-the-PL

França
França-SG
'...but he [and I] now got the signature about the Franças' episode'
(cf. SBP: "mas ele [e eu] agora pegamos as assinaturas dos episódios dos
Franças")

7- duas pulícia qui vinhum indu... fardadinhu

two-FEM police-FEM-SG that came going... dressed-DIM-MASC-SING

di pulícia
of police
'Two policeman were coming...dressed like policemen'
 296

(cf. SBP: "Dois policiais vinham vindo, fardados de policiais")

8- aí... (até) dá seis hora... qui minha casa...

then... (until) gives six hour-SG... that my-FEM house-FEM
' Then...until it was six o'clock... that my house...'
(cf. SBP: "aí...até darem seis horas... que a minha casa")

era () tava cheinhu di gente

was () was full-DIM-MASC of people
'was full of people'
(cf. SBP: "estava cheia de gente")

9- só duas muié... dois homi... treis homi... um é mortu

only two woman-SING...two man-SING...three man-SING... one is dead
'Only two women .... two men .... three men .... one is dead'
(cf. SBP: "somente duas mulheres... dois homens.... três homens... um está
morto")

10- a vida da genti era muitu proibidu dimais

the life of-the people was very prohibided too
'Our life was too full of prohibitions'
(Cf. SBP: " A nossas vidas eram cheias de demasiadas proibições")
 297

3. Speech of the black community Mata Cavalos (Vogt and Fry

1985b:115)

Eu nasci aqui e sempre vivi em Mata-Cavalo.

I was-born here and always lived in Mata-Cavalo-SING
'I was born here and have always lived in Mata-Cavalos'
(cf. SBP: " Nasci aqui e sempre vivi em Mata-Cavalos")

O lugar que fui mais longe é Dom Aquino.

The place that went more far is Dom Aquino
'The farthest place I've been to is Dom Aquino'
(cf. SBP: " O lugar mais longe em que já estive é Dom Aquino")

Foi lá ver uma irmã meu que mandou um bilhete

Went-3SING there see a sister my-MASC that sent a note
'I went there to see my sister who sent a note'
(cf. SBP: " Fui lá para ver uma irmã minha que mandou um bilhete")
pra mim porque estava passando mal.
to me because was feeling bad
'to me because she was sick'
(cf. SBP: "para mim porque estava passando mal")

Uma irmã, já uma mulher, com oito ou dez f ilhos.

a sister, already a woman, with eight or ten children
 298

'A sister, already a grown woman, with eight or ten children'

(cf. SBP: " Uma irmã, já uma mulher, com oito ou dez filhos")

Um filho dela mudou para lá,

a son of-hers moved to there
'One of her sons moved there'
(cf. SBP: " Um filho dela mudou para lá")

achou muito bom a situação lá e mandou buscar ela.

found very good-MASC the-FEM situation-FEM there and sent bring she
'he found the situation there to be good and sent for her'
(cf. SBP: "achou a situação muito boa e mandou buscar-la")

Dom Aquino é aí onde, este, o primeiro nome tratavum Mutum.

Dom Aquino is there where this the first name treated Mutum
'Dom Aquino is there, where.... it used to be called Mutum'
(cf. SBP: "Dom Aquino é aí onde... o antigo nome era Mutum")
Então porque ele foi afilhado de Dom Aquino
Then because he was god-child of Dom Aquino
'Because he was a god-child of Dom Aquino's"
(cf. SBP: " Então, porque ele era afilhado do Dom Aquino")

é que ficou com o nome, este, de Dom Aquino...

is that stayed with the name this of Dom Aquino
 299

'it got this name, this one, Dom Aquino'

(cf. SBP: "é que ficou com o nome de Dom Aquino")

Tem muita cobra aqui. A cobra, este,

Has much-FEM snake-FEM here. The-FEM snake-FEM this-MASC
'There are a lot of snakes here. The snake'
(Cf. SBP: "Há muita cobra aqui. A cobra")

é a fera maior que tem aqui em Mato Grosso;

is a beast biggest that has here in Mato Grosso;
'is the biggest beast there is here in Mato Grosso;'
(cf. SBP: "é a maior fera que há aqui em Mato Grosso;")

é isso. Nem a onça é tão perigoso como a

is this. Not-even the-FEM jaguar-FEM is so dangerous-MASC as the-FEM
'this is it. Not even the jaguar is as dangerous as the'
(cf. SBP: " é isso. Nem mesmo a onça é tão perigosa como a")

cobra. Tem a cascavel, este, é o rei

snake-FEM. Has the-FEM rattle-snake this-MASC is the-MASC king
'snake. There is the rattle-snake, this one is the king'
(cf. SBP: "cobra. Há a cascavel, que é o rei")

dos bichos.
 300

of-the-PL animals.
'of the animals'
(cf. SBP: "dos animais.")

REFERENCES

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