Hanna Batoréo
Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, Portugal

The role of processes of contact-induced language change and partial restructuring
in the emergence of an East Timorese NDV of Portuguese

Keywords: Portuguese as a pluricentric language; East Timorese NDV of Portuguese; contact-induced language change; language restructuring in an emergent variety.

It is generally accepted that both history and contact shape language but language contact is typically invoked as a prime factor in the emergence of diaspora varieties of a language. Our paper will focus on an emerging East Timorese variety of Portuguese (Batoréo 2011b, Afonso & Goglia [in press]), being Portuguese studied here from a pluricentric language perspective (cf. Clyne 1992, Delcourt & Muhr 2001  Silva et al. (org.) 2011, Muhr 2012). As in the case of other pluricentric languages some variety formation processes will be discussed in the case of the ET variety, such as varieties mixing, formal simplicity, variety levelling, and focusing. Also contact-induced language change processes will be focused upon, such as borrowing, convergence, L2 acquisition, and substratum influence. Special focus will be given to usage of ‘já’ (already) as a tense marker in ET NDV of Portuguese and of the specificity of uses of the ‘é que’ construction, which marks emphatic, interrogative and/or exclamative construction in DV of Portuguese (Batoréo 2011a & b).

Afonso, Susana & Francesco Goglia. (in press). Portuguese in East Timor as a non-dominant variety in the making. In: Rudolf

Muhr, Dawn Marley in collaboration with Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford and Leo Kretzenbacher (eds.). Pluricentric Languages Worldwide and Pluricentric Theory. Wien et. al.: Peter Lang Verlag.

Batoréo, Hanna Jakubowicz. 2011a. Funções da construção ´é que’ no Português de Timor: Para conhecimento das características linguísticas da(s) língua(s) materna(s) (L1) dos aprendentes do Português LNM. In: Textos Seleccionados do XXVI Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 2010, CD-ROM, ISBN-13:978-9899744004.

Batoréo, Hanna Jakubowicz. 2011b. What do we know of Portuguese as a pluricentric language? Portuguese language usage in East Timor: The case of the polysemous marker ‘já’ and evidence of language contact in East Timorese written L2 texts. In: Silva eta lii (eds.) (2011). 127-136.

Clyne, Michael (ed.) (1992): Pluricentric Languages. Differing Norms in Different Countries. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Delcourt, Christian / Muhr Rudolf (2001): Les Langue Pluricentriques. Varietés nationales des langues européennes à lintérieur et à l\'extérieur de l\'espace européen. Numbero thematique 79/2001 de Revue Belge de Philologie et Histoire. Fasc. 3: Langues et Litteratures Modernes.

Muhr, Rudolf (2012): Linguistic dominance and non-dominance in pluricentric languages: A typology. In: Rudolf Muhr (ed.) (2012): Non-dominant Varieties of pluricentric Languages. Getting the Picture. In memory of Michael Clyne. Wien et. al., Peter Lang Verlag. p. 23-48.

Silva, Augusto Soares da, Amadeu Torres & Miguel Gonçalves (eds.) (2011). Línguas Pluricêntricas: Variação Linguística e Dimensões Sociocognitivas / Pluricentric Languages: Linguistic Variation and Sociognitive Dimensions, Braga: Aletheia, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa.