The course “Portuguese Linguistics: Grammar” aims to provide students with an adequate understanding of various aspects of Portuguese morphosyntax, with a special emphasis on the European variety but with specific references to other varieties (Brazilian and African). The approach to Portuguese morphosyntax will be primarily descriptive but will have current theoretical perspectives underlying it.
Students will begin the course by studying the morphosyntactic classes of words. Subsequently, students will study the syntactic structure of simple sentences, addressing issues such as constituent structure, syntactic and semantic functions, types of verbal predicates and word order patterns. In the final part of the semester, students will briefly study the syntactic structure of complex sentences, distinguishing coordination from subordination and characterizing (syntactically and semantically) different types of sentence coordination and subordinate clauses.
The classes will alternate moments of theoretical explanation with moments in which students will be invited to carry out linguistic analysis exercises to consolidate knowledge and verify the correct acquisition of the different contents. Classwork will be complemented by students carrying out independent work (reading the recommended bibliography and carrying out exercises to consolidate the acquired knowledge).
Portuguese (European variety) will be used as the working language in class and as the language to be analyzed.
At the end of the course, students should:
(i) Explain the core linguistic patterns and mechanisms at the morphology, syntax and lexicon level of Portuguese.
(ii) Describe the specific place of Portuguese among Romance languages.
(iii) Compare the main, different varieties of Portuguese.
(iv) Reorganise the basic notions of grammar already acquired or being acquired in other courses.
(v) Demonstrate advanced proficiency in reading, writing and speaking skills in Portuguese.
(vi) Assemble and compare data from language corpora as a learning tool for Portuguese.