Editorial. Possession and Location in African Varieties of Portuguese

Early versions of the four papers in this special collection were presented at the first workshop of the FCT-funded project Possession and Location: Microvariation in African Varieties of Portuguese (PALMA), held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon in January 2020. The main goal of PALMA was to investigate and provide new insights into semantic and syntactic aspects in the domain of the argument structure of verbs of possession and location in the urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo), and São Tomé and Príncipe (São Tomé), which are at different stages of an ongoing nativization process and historically in contact with different languages and typologies. This editorial places the content and contribution of the papers in this special collection within the wider context of the relatively young and fast-growing field of research on African varieties of Portuguese. It briefly addresses the sociohistorical and linguistic background in which these varieties emerged, the state of research, and the factors that have played a pivotal role in the debate on the linguistic properties and language variation, in particular the role of language contact, general principles of grammar, and schooling.