Language contact and grammatical change

In this paper, we show how the development of wh- interrogative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese was affected by an intense process of interlinguistic contact with African languages. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from socio-historical and linguistic facts. Based on the concept of irregular linguistic transmission (Lucchesi; Baxter, 2009) and on some generative assumptions about how to derive wh- questions, our results help to build a broad picture of the diachronic evolution of Brazilian Portuguese. In fact, we reinforce the view that language contact may have been the trigger for the implementation of a series of distinctive characteristics of the contemporary vernacular spoken in Brazil, in contrast both to European Portuguese and older stages of the language.