Event Details

HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Gian Luigi de Rosa (Università Roma Tre)

Title: Grammatical heritage and language maintenance: Brazilian heritage speakers in contact with Italian

Presenter(s): Gian Luigi de Rosa (Università Roma Tre)

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

The presentation focuses on the description of some grammatical phenomena that highlight the linguistic competence in maintenance that characterises the Brazilian heritage (BH) speaker, i.e. we intend to identify structures of maintenance of their mother tongue competence that emerge from their discourse in the Italian-speaking context, and to verify to which social and functional aspects these structures are correlated.

In order to achieve this goal, we will analyse a series of marked topic constructions (CTs) - namely topicalization, right dislocation, hanging topicalization and left dislocation - in their role as maintenance structures in a written corpus of heritage speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as well as some of the syntactic changes typical of neo-standard BP, such as the change of the pro-drop parameter. In fact, the neo-standard variety of BP has undergone a series of linguistic changes that have resulted in it gradually losing the characteristics of a null-subject language (such as Italian or European Portuguese), thus moving from a pro-drop to a partial pro-drop language.

Part of this research has been published in "Heranças Gramaticais do Português Brasileiro" (Editora UFG, 2022), a book written with Vânia Casseb-Galvão of the Federal University of Goiás, in Brazil.