Koinéization and language contact

Abstract

This chapter explores how Portuguese has historically been both the recipient and disseminator of morphosyntactic innovations as a result of both dialect mixing and language contact. Drawing on notions of koinéization to explain the observed simplification, levelling, and subsequent mixing in both the European and Brazilian Portuguese paradigms, we compare the verbal and pronominal paradigms of singular and plural address in Galician, European Portuguese, and varieties of spoken Brazilian Portuguese. We contend that the same mechanisms, whereby the most frequent, transparent, and least marked forms prevail, are responsible for the different mixed paradigms in all varieties, but that change and simplification is more intense in Brazil, with extreme variation and morphological overabundance, for sociohistorical reasons. In exploring Portuguese-as-disseminator, we examine how Brazilian Portuguese has stimulated morphosyntactic change in Nheengatu, the most widely spoken language in Amazonia until the end of the nineteenth century and which is still spoken by a multi-ethnic population in north-west Brazil. We consider alignment of pronominal and number systems and new diachronic data on the grammaticalization of the Nheengatu GO future, revealing how Brazilian Portuguese is contributing to hybridization in languages that historically have exhibited quite different typologies.