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Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 135–150

Chapter 5
Wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French

| Universidade Estadual de Campinas
In this paper I propose (a) that Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French underwent a very similar diachronic development of wh-questions; (b) that the great structural change in both languages was the loss of long wh-movement with the appearance of a short wh-movement to a position of Focus left-adjacent to vP. This change also affected cleft sentences, turning inverse clefts into canonic clefts. The other variants resulted from phonological reduction and do not constitute syntactic “doublets”, but stylistic ones.
Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese, Quebec French, structural change, phonological change, wh-movement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The diachronic evolution of wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French
    • 1.2Theoretical assumptions
  • 2.The analysis
    • 2.1The loss of the wh-V2 pattern
    • 2.2The entry of the cleft question of the inverse type
    • 2.3The loss of long wh-movement
    • 2.4From inverse-wh-clefts to canonic wh-clefts
    • 2.5The apparent double filled Comp pattern
    • 2.6The appearance of wh-SV, the last innovation
      • 2.6.1First hypothesis
      • 2.6.2Second hypothesis
  • 3.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.260.05kat
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