A study on preposition stranding and orphaning in speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 18/24511-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2019
• End date: December 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
• Principal Investigator: Livia Oushiro
• Grantee: Julia Bahia Adams
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From the observation of the occurrence of structures similar to preposition stranding - as in "é algo que vale a pena conversar sobre" ('it is something worth talking about') - and orphaning - as in "não tenho opinião sobre" ('I don't have an opinion about it') - in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), in this project we propose the description of the occurrences of these structures on a corpus of spontaneous speech, based on the theory and methods of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008 [1972]). We also aim to test and evaluate new methods of sociolinguistic data collection on online social media (Facebook and Twitter) through R (R Core Team, 2018). Considering that such structures are characteristically associated with English and French, and the possibility that those structures in BP may have resulted from language contact in bilinguals' speech, we aim to situate stranding and orphaning in relation to other options of preposition placement that maintain the same referential meaning, with the perspective that those are innovative structures in their initial stages of implementation. In that regard, this research resonates with larger matters in Sociolinguistics, such as the analysis of syntactic variation (Labov, 1978; Lavandera, 1978) and the actuation problem (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 2006 [1968]), and is the basis for a larger research we intend to develop presently.