Goal arguments of ir ‘to go’ and chegar ‘to arrive’ in three African varieties of Portuguese

Abstract

Inresearch on African varieties of Portuguese, especially Angolan and MozambicanPortuguese, it is often referred that Goal arguments of verbs of movement showa tendency to be headed by locative preposition em ‘in’, contrastingwith the use of a ‘to’and para ‘to, toward’ in EuropeanPortuguese. Language contact is generally considered theprimary factor with respect to the use of the noncanonical pattern. Usingspoken corpora of the urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican and SantomeanPortuguese, this paper develops a case-study of Goal arguments that occur with twofrequently used verbs of inherently directed motion, ir ‘to go’ and chegar‘to arrive’, to assess the contact-induced hypothesis and to explore alternative,semantic-based hypotheses. Overall, a cross-comparison of the varieties atstake and their main contact languages shows that the role of language contactis limited at best. A semantic analysis of em, on the other hand, showspromising results, since the occurrence of this preposition is favored by NPsthat denote an entity with well-defined boundaries and is sensitive to thelexical semantics of the verbs, i.e., whether the verb describes a durative ornon-durative change of place, and to the type of eventuality described by thepredication.