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In:The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil
Edited by Laura Álvarez López, Perpétua Gonçalves and Juanito Ornelas de Avelar
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 20] 2018
► pp. 211–236

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Chapter 9
The Africa-Brazil continuum

The case of passives and impersonal constructions

 | University of São Paulo
 | University of São Paulo
 | University of São Paulo
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 22 November 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.20.10pet
Abstract
This chapter discusses the hypothesis that some impersonal constructions of Brazilian Portuguese and a type of passive of Angolan Portuguese are the outcome of the contact between Classical Portuguese and Bantu languages. This can be taken as possible evidence for the Africa-Brazil linguistic continuum (Petter 2007). Emphasis is given to the Bantu (b)a-passives, and to Classical Portuguese topic constructions. Following Mufwene (2008), the authors argue that a linguistic feature pool with elements of different languages was formed in the ecologies of language practice in the colonies of Brazil and Angola. Linguistic features of the different languages in contact were selected based on what the interactants perceived as congruences among them, thus forming the basis of what later became Brazilian and Angolan Portuguese.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief history of language contact in the Portuguese colonies
    • 2.1The presence of the Portuguese in Africa and of Africans in Portugal
    • 2.2The presence of the Portuguese and of Africans in Brazil
    • 2.3The presence of the Portuguese in Angola
  • 3.Impersonals and ‘passives’ in Bantu
  • 4.The Africa-Brazil continuum
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
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2025. The Emergence of Creoles and Pidgins. In Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation, ► pp. 42 ff. DOI logo
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