Term Paper on "Portuguese Is a Language That Proves"

Term Paper 13 pages (4154 words) Sources: 7

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Portuguese is a language that proves its longevity and strict rules and regulations through the research that has been conducted over the years. This is a language that is strong in culture and dialect, while maintaining its individuality throughout its existence. The purpose of the current writing is to discuss the history and the culture of Portuguese, while also giving some insight into the structure that makes it the language that it is today. It is evident that there is research concerning the dialect as well as the plethora of variations that exist, however, there is a lack of evidence to explain the true linguistics. Portuguese language (2010), defines the Portuguese language as a member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Portuguese is the native dialect of over 170 million people, of whom are primarily located in Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic; in Brazil and in Portugal's former overseas provinces in Africa and Asia -- Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe. It has been expressed that there are differences in the Portuguese spoken in areas like Brazil, where pronunciation varies slightly; however, the difference has been considered minor and not of any particular difference.

Portuguese language (2011), explains that in Northwestern Spain a dialect of Portuguese that is spoken is referred to as Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain, is a dialect of Portuguese. Written materials in Portuguese date from a property agreement of the late 12th century, and literary works appeared in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 2008, the Portuguese parliament passed an act mandating the use of a standardized orthography based on Brazilian forms. Standard Portuguese is based on the dialect of Lisbon. Dialectal variation within the country is not great, but Brazilian Portuguese varies from European Portuguese in several respects, including several sound changes and some differences in verb conjugation and syntax.

Structure & Background of the Language

In the tradition of linguistics, most investigations tend to equate an utterance's basic proposition with its semantic representation. This perspective although theoretically attractive, can prove to be problematic. At the same time, current research in pragmatics can help offer a more realistic alternative that would allow contextual intrusions to influence the basic proposition communicated by an utterance. A suitable pragmatic framework that could provide a rich background in which to investigate propositional content without compromising the account's psychological plausibility is Relevance Theory, which has already developed a realistic approach to cognition. The research conducted here set out to examine propositional content as this is constructed during utterance interpretation and in accordance with the relevance-driven comprehension procedure (Ebert & Endriss, 2005).

Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese know how to distinguish the Paulista (Sao Paulo) variety from the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) variety, the Gaucha (Rio Grande do Sul) variety from those spoken in the northeast and north, without mentioning all other types of varieties of Portuguese in Brazil. A native speaker also knows differences in linguistic uses: for example, that some expressions belong to the speech of younger persons and those particular expressions can only be used in informal situations, etc. To know one language is also to know its varieties. Varieties are not ugly or beautiful, right or wrong, good or bad, elegant or inelegant; they are simply different (Massini-Cagliari, 2004).

Romance languages (2011), explains that there are five main Portuguese dialect groups, all mutually intelligible: Northern, or Galician, Central, or Beira, Southern (Estremenho, including Lisbon, Alentejo, and Algarve), Insular, including the dialects of Madeira and the Azores, and Brazilian. Standard Portuguese was developed in the 16th century, basically from the dialects spoken from Lisbon to Coimbra. Brazilian (Brasileiro) differs from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal in several respects, in syntax as well as phonology and vocabulary, but many writers still use an academic metropolitan standard. A creolized form, once widespread in Brazil, seems now to be dying out. A Judeo-Portuguese is attested in 18th-century Amsterdam and Livorno (Leghorn, Italy), but virtually no trace of that dialect remains today. In the region of northwestern Spain, that adjoins Portugal, the Galician dialects lack uniformity and are closer to Spanish. Even in Castile, where standard Spanish (Castilian) originated, Galician was the conventional language of the courtly lyric until roughly 1400, but it lost ground in the 15th century, and Castilian replaced Galician as the official language of Galicia in 1500. Dialect poetry in Galician has flourished from the 18th century, with an upsurge in the 19th century.

It is reported that until the 15th century, Portuguese and Galician formed one single linguistic unit, Gallego-Portuguese. The first evidence for the language consists of scattered words in 9th -- 12th-century Latin texts; continuous documents date from approximately 1192, the date assigned to an extant property agreement between the children of a well-to-do family from the Minho River valley. Literature began to flourish especially during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the soft Gallego-Portuguese tongue was preferred by courtly lyric poets throughout the Iberian Peninsula except in the Catalan area. In the 16th century, Portugal's golden age, Galician and Portuguese grew further apart, with the consolidation of the standard Portuguese language. From the 16th to the 18th century, Galician was used only as a home language (i.e., as a means of communication within the family). Toward the end of the 18th century, it was revived as a language of culture. Today, with Spanish, it is an official language of the autonomous community of Galicia (Romance languages, 2011).

Researchers go further to express that Brazil is the only Portuguese speaking country in America and is surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. The fifth largest country in the world, with a population of 175 million inhabitants, Brazil is and was viewed, both by foreign observers but also by its own population, as an enormous, linguistically homogeneous giant. Generally, Brazilians assume that everybody in Brazil speaks a unique variety of the Portuguese language. According to this language perception, Brazil is a country without any linguistic problems. This language perception by Brazilians can be considered correct only in the sense that almost everyone can communicate through Portuguese everywhere within the Brazilian territory. Indeed, in Brazil, almost the total population is constituted of monolingual Portuguese speakers, and the vast majority of them will never learn a second language (Massini-Cagliari, 2004).

This study conducted by Jesus & Shadle (2002) concerned Portuguese phonetics and phonology which indicate that fricatives are central to some interesting features of the language, yet studies of Portuguese fricatives have been few and limited. In this study, Portuguese fricatives were analyzed in ways designed to enhance our description of the language and to increase our understanding of the production of fricatives. Corpora of Portuguese words containing / f, v, s, z, ?, z/, nonsense words of the pattern / V1FV2 / that follow Portuguese phonological rules, and sustained fricatives were recorded by four native speakers of European Portuguese (two men, two women). Results of analysis show that more than half of the voiced fricatives devoice; devoicing occurs more often in word-final fricatives. Averaged power spectra were computed for all fricatives and parameterized in order to aid comparisons across speaker and across corpus, and to gain insight into the production mechanisms underlying the language-specific variations. Substantial differences were found between spectra of voiced and unvoiced, same-place fricatives. The parameters spectral slope, frequency of maximum amplitude, and dynamic amplitude, derived from previous studies, behaved as predicted for changes in effort level, voicing, and location within the fricative. Changes in syllable stress, however, did not affect the fricatives in a manner consistent with effort level variation. Some combinations were also useful for separating the fricatives by place or by sibilance.

In research conducted by Guy (1981), a quantitative analysis was conducted on a group of linguistic variables in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In addition, the researcher used the results to attack problems found in the history of the Portuguese language, as well as in the variations in linguistics. The variables in question are two cases where phonology and syntax interact. First, there is variation in nominal plural marking, constrained mainly by position of a word in the NP, so that the first word is almost always marked, but subsequent words are rarely marked. Interacting with this is a variable phonological rule deleting final S (producing, e.g. meno for menos) -- which happens to be the main nominal plural marker. Second, there is variation in subject-verb number agreement, so that plural subjects often co-occur with singular verbs. The results of the research indicate:

An investigation of the social distribution of the variables showed small stylistic differences; regular (and sometimes powerful) sex differences with women more closely approximating the standard than men, and no age grading nor any evidence of change in progress. The results of the quantitative analysis are used in an investigation of the origins of the popular dialect. & #8230; Evidence from social history, such as the vast numbers of African slaves taken to Brazil… READ MORE

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