Syntactic contrasts in early and late Brazilian Portuguese-European Portuguese bidialectal bilinguals Data from production

Castro, Tammer and Rothman, Jason and Westergaard, Marit (2020) Syntactic contrasts in early and late Brazilian Portuguese-European Portuguese bidialectal bilinguals Data from production. In: Linguistic Approaches to Portuguese as an Additional Language :. Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics . John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 35-59. ISBN 9789027261502

Abstract

This study explores the production of subject and object pronouns in the case of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) early and late bidialectal bilinguals. The distribution of empty categories in the two systems differs in terms of syntactic and semantic constraints. In this light, we test the extent to which Brazilians acquiring EP naturalistically in Portugal display cross-linguistic effects. Our results indicate that cross-linguistic effects are found both in BP and EP for late learners, but only in BP for early learners. We believe that the high degree of typological proximity between BP and EP and the structural differences between subjects and objects can better explain these learners' outcomes.