Dative microvariation in African Varieties of Portuguese

Inthis paper we compare ditransitive dative structures in nativized andnativizing urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Mozambique and SãoTomé and Príncipe using a corpus-based approach. It is shown that theexpression of the Recipient exhibits considerable variation within and acrossthese varieties, as well as at intraspeaker level. Despite the use ofnon-canonical patterns, namely prepositional structures with em and paraanddouble object constructions, the canonical European Portuguesepattern with Case marker a is predominant in our data. Moreover, thepronominalized counterparts of these different realizations show much lessvariation and strong convergence toward dative clitic lhe(s). To accountfor the data, we propose a Larsonian VP-shell in which Recipients as extendedDPs occur internally to a K(ase) projection whose functional head can bespelled out as a, em or para. Recipient in double objectconstructions, on the other hand, are treated as plain DPs which maypronominalize as dative clitics or, less commonly, as strong pronouns. Overall,our hypothesis weakens the role of language contact, which has often beenassumed as a critical factor in the literature, but still allows for(individual) grammars that show evidence of being substrate-induced.