Origins of Brazilian Portuguese: Discussing the creole hypothesis

This talk was presented by Marta M. P. Scherre, a Senior Associate Researcher of the University of Brasília and Senior Researcher of the National Research Council of Brazil. In this talk, the authors reexamined the hypothesis that Brazilian Portuguese may have a creole origin in a previous mixed linguistic system made up of the Portuguese lexicon together with African structure. After presenting the creole hypothesis, which is based on the role of social conditions propitious for the appearance of creole languages in colonial Brazil and the structural distinctions between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, they argued against it by bringing into focus the role of linguistic constraints in number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese and the role of non-standard European Portuguese in accounting for the genesis of Brazilian Portuguese.

In addition, Professor Scherre offered a workshop on VARBRUL, a statistical program used in linguistic variation studies. This class took place in conjunction with Span 580 (Variation in Spanish) on October 16, at 3:30 and was open to the public.

I Symposium on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: Acquisition and Teaching .

The Symposium took place on March 21-23, 2003, at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ The theme addressed by participants focused on the fastest-growing sector of teaching of Portuguese as a foreign/second language. The event, the first of its kind in the United States, was sponsored by three institutions: the University of Arizona, Stanford University and the University of Kansas, and it was funded mostly through Title VI grants to the Centers for Latin American Studies of the three universities.

Ana Maria Carvalho (Chair), Antonio Simões and Lyris Wiedemann were the organizers. The Symposium included seven round-tables and 21 presentations that varied from an appraisal of past, present and future of the field and the acquisition/teaching of Portuguese phonology, morphology and syntax to assessment and testing and sociolinguistic issues. In addition to the organizers, John Jensen (Florida International University), Orlando Kelm (University of Texas, Austin), Dale Koike (University of Texas, Austin) and Carmen Tesser (University of Georgia and Middlebury College) moderated the discussions. The keynote speaker was José Carlos Paes de Almeida Filho, from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. An important aspect of the meeting was its gathering of scholars from the three main world areas where teaching and research on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers take place: the United States, Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin-America, represented by Mexico (UNAM). A volume on the acquisition and teaching of Portuguese for Spanish Speakers, comprised mostly of papers presented at the symposium is currently in the works, has been published by Pontes Editora, making themes discussed at the symposium easily accessible to other colleagues. The book, Português para Falantes de Espanhol - Artigos Selecionados Escritos em Português e Inglês , is going to be available in June of 2004. If you are interested in the book, please visit Pontes Editora at http://www.ponteseditores.com.br/.