Brazilian Uniqueness

In analyzing specific properties of the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, FAPESP Thematic Project researchers make discoveries that could change current linguistic analysis models

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – The Portuguese spoken in Brazil has certain syntactic properties found neither in European Portuguese nor other languages. For over four years, a group of researchers studied what is known about these properties in order to discuss it in terms of the newest paradigm in linguistic research: the Minimalist Program.

Finished at the end of February, the Thematic Project Sintaxe gerativa do português brasileiro na entrada do século 21: Minimalismo e Interfaces, (Generative Syntax of Brazilian Portuguese at the Dawn of 21st Century: Minimalism and Interfaces), financed by FAPESP, was coordinated by Jairo Nunes, professor at the College of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at the Universidade of São Paulo (USP).

According to Nunes, the main result of the project was the book Minimalist Essays on Brazilian Portuguese Syntax released in 2009, which brings together ten articles produced by the participants.

“The project’s main goal was to capitalize the knowledge already acquired on the distinctive syntactic properties of Brazilian Portuguese and discuss it under the light of the Minimalist Program to find out how much these properties can be explained in their interface with other grammatical components,” he told Agência FAPESP.

The Minimalist Program was established in 1995 by MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, derived from the Principles and Parameters Theory that Chomsky had formulated in the 1980s, which was based on a linguistics tradition that began in the mid-20th century.

The Principals and Parameters Theory established the idea that there is an inactive, biologically founded component in the human predisposition to learn a language and that all linguistic production follows a “universal grammar,” common to all human beings.

“It was then discovered that linguistic knowledge is organized in terms of principles—invariable properties in all languages—and parameters, which are the patterns and options that codify bundles of these properties. The task of a child that learns a language would therefore be to establish the values of these parameters,” explained Nunes.

The Minimalist Program proposes not only to investigate the properties of language faculty and the role it plays in the acquisition of a native language, but also to try and explain why language faculty has exactly these and not other properties.

By establishing a common base between all languages, the new paradigm of the Principles and Parameters Theory, according to Nunes, made possible the detailed comparisons among the broadest array of languages in diverse stages of development.

“This unleashed an enormous explosion of knowledge in linguistics. It is no exaggeration to say that we have learned more about human language since 1980 than in all the centuries leading up to it,” he affirms.

Nunes says that there has been a profusion of studies on Brazilian Portuguese since that time showing that the language spoken in Brazil uses very particular grammar, different from that used in European Portuguese and the other romance languages.

“After the 1980s, the question that guided research was ‘What are the properties of human language, and how are they organized?’ In the Thematic Project, we sought to reshape accumulated knowledge in the light of new advances achieved through the Minimalist Program. The main question then became  ‘Why do the properties organize themselves the way we observe them?’,” he said.