The Sociolinguistics Working Group is hosting a talk by Ronald Beline Mendes of the Universidade de São Paulo this Friday, April 17, on "Language change from within: from auxiliary verb to prefix in Brazilian Portuguese".
Time: 11 AM - 12:30 PM.
Place: NYU Linguistics Dept. Classroom, 726 Broadway, 7th floor
Ronald was a visitor to this department in 2001-2002. His talk will examine data on a possible change in progress in Brazilian Portuguese, where the auxiliary verb 'estar' is frequently reduced to 'ta' and cliticized to the following main verb. The age and social distribution of this variable suggest a change in progress. Parallels with other cliticization processes underway in Brazilian Portuguese will also be examined.