Research Seminar 3rd March

28 Feb 2017

Critical Approaches to the Portuguese-speaking world

Filipe Meneses (Maynooth)
Nélia Alexandre (Lisbon)

Filipe Meneses
United by war? The Portuguese-speaking world, 1914-1918

Brazil’s declaration of war against Germany, in October 1917, completed the unification of the Portuguese-speaking world around a common purpose. Portugal and its colonial empire, Brazil, and the Portuguese emigrant communities abroad now formed a single linguistic community waging war. For many in Portugal this heralded a new dawn from the country, allowing it to emerge from the shadow of the British alliance which had dominated its diplomatic life for centuries – but this illusion was short-lived, as events would soon make clear.

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Filipe Meneses reads History and Philosophy in Trinity College Dublin, where he also concluded his PhD in History. He joined NUI Maynooth in 1997/8. He has published widely in aspects of contemporary Portuguese and Spanish history. In 2005/6 he was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, in the University of Lisbon, and in 2012/13 he was the FLAD/Brown Michael Teague Visiting Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University.

Nélia Alexandre 
(Re-)Interpretations of Lusophony in language: a look at the Cape Verdean Creole

The goal of this talk is twofold. First, I intend to present an overview of the Cape Verdean Creole, one of the oldest Portuguese-based creole languages in the world spoken in Cape Verde and in the diaspora. Second, I’ll address the sociolinguistic situation of Cape Verde, focusing on the role of language contact between Cape Verdean Creole (the native language of almost all Capeverdeans) and Portuguese, the only official language in Cape Verde.

Based on corpora, I will conclude that there are some properties of the grammar of Cape Verdean Creole that are transferred to the Portuguese spoken at the country and vice-versa.

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Nélia Alexandre has a Ph.D. on Linguistics, specifically on the syntax of wh-constructions in Cape Verdean Creole (https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/cll.41/main). She is a member of the research team Anagrama (Grammatical Analysis and Corpora, http://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/en/10-research/404-anagrama) of the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon since 2009. Her research interests have evolved from Portuguese to (Cape Verdean) Creole syntax and, more recently, to the acquisition of Portuguese L2, especially in language contact settings, like some national varieties of Portuguese in Africa. She is Assistant Professor at University of Lisbon, Faculty of Arts, where she coordinates courses of Portuguese as Foreign Language (PFL) and collaborates in advanced training courses for PLF (Chinese) teachers. She collaborates with several national and international research groups, such as

(i) VAPOR (African Varieties of Portuguese, http://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/en/10-research/715-vapor-african-varieties-of-portuguese);

(ii) COPLE2 (Learner Corpus of Portuguese L2, http://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/en/10-research/472-learner-corpus-of-portuguese-l2-cople2);

(iii) Cátedra de Português Língua Segunda e Estrangeira (http://www.catedraportugues.uem.mz); and

(iv) Cátedra Eugénio Tavares - Língua Portuguesa (http://www.unicv.edu.cv/index.php/pt/itemid-dest/3754-uni-cv-e-o-camoes-instituto-inauguram-catedra-eugenio-tavares-de-lingua-portuguesa).