Updates

New Publication: “Evaluating the form of third-person anaphoric direct objects in Portuguese: A cross-dialectal study.”
April 15, 2025

A new article by Kendra Dickinson, Luana Lamberti, and Scott Schwenter investigates the evaluation of third-person anaphoric direct objects (DOs) in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). While both dialects allow null DOs, EP prefers clitics and BP favors tonic pronouns as overt forms. Using acceptability judgments from 215 Portuguese-speaking participants (1752 responses), the study found that null DOs are generally rated most positively in both varieties. Additionally, clitic forms in EP and tonic forms in BP were preferred with animate, specific referents. These findings support ongoing shifts in BP’s use of overt DOs, aligning more with EP clitic patterns.

Citation:
Dickinson, K. V., Lamberti, L., & Schwenter, S. (2025). “Evaluating the form of third-person anaphoric direct objects in Portuguese: A cross-dialectal study.” Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 24(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/jpl.16290

OSUCHiLL 2025

March 22, 2025

This spring, our lab manager Victoria Cataloni co-organized the 28th Annual Ohio State University Congress on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (OSUCHiLL) with fellow SPPO grad students Josmary Medina Heredia and Laura Trenta. Held March 21–22, 2025, this graduate-student-run conference welcomed over 100 attendees, including many international scholars presenting innovative research on Spanish, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Mary E. Beaton (Denison University), who researches sociophonetics in Puerto Rican Spanish; Dr. Ana María Carvalho (University of Arizona), whose work focuses on Spanish-Portuguese contact in South America - she also premiered her documentary Vozes das margens; and Dr. Chad Howe (University of Georgia), a specialist in language change and Andean language contact, who presented on language taboos in Brazilian Portuguese. This year’s keynote was especially meaningful as Dr. Howe and Dr. Mary E. Beaton are prior members of the lab!

Our other lab members also presented their research: Diego Ruiz-Tagle Muñoz with Josmary Medina Heredia explored variation in para yo poder vs. para que yo pueda constructions; Natàlia Server Benetó examined total as an affiliative discourse marker in Spanish from Spain and Mexico; and Dr. Scott Schwenter, along with Evan Beard, presented on syntactic function and acceptability of a gente in Brazilian Portuguese.