Project for the History of Paulista Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The Project for the History of Paulista Brazilian Portuguese (PHPP) is a set of articulated subprojects within the Historical Linguistics of Portuguese. It aims at (a) collecting, organising, and making diachronic corpora of Paulista Portuguese available in order to support investigations into this variety; (b) analysing such corpora in three areas: (i) studies on Grammatical variation and change according to the cognitive-functionalist and generative perspectives, placing emphasis on word classes and syntactic constructions; (ii) the study on the formation of standard and non-standard varieties, as well as the diffusion of non-standard variety to the River Tietê region, running parallel with the sociohistorical outline of Paulista Portuguese; (iii) studies on discourse genres and textual construction processes based on Critical Discourse Analysis and Textual-interactive perspective. Based on this framework, the Project for the History of Paulista Portuguese seeks to encourage a dialogue among linguistic theories, which is essential to contemporary Historical Linguistics research, not only to account for the complexity of the phenomena under analysis, but also for the subprojects to complement each other. In fact, the grammatical, semantic and discoursive dimensions are proposed as categories that constitute language in use. Therefore, the extent of the project can be justified. Moreover, confined to Paulista Portuguese, it will contribute enormously to the Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese, which includes, apart from São Paulo, ten other States, namely Pernambuco, Bahia, Paraíba, Alagoas, Ceará, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Norte and Pará. This great national project has emerged from the PHPP initiatives taken in 1997. (AU)