As perguntas-wh no Vêneto Brasileiro

Abstract

The following paper seeks to present a brief overview of the syntax of the whquestions of the "Brazilian Venetian", spoken in the southern region of Brazil, from the perspective of Cartographic Syntax (RIZZI, 1997; 2001; RIZZI; BOCCI, 2017; MIOTO, 2001). Since "Brazilian Venetian" is a heritage language (FRASSON, 2022) that emerged from the Italian immigration (late 19th century), it is intended to verify, in particular, how the language is characterized in relation to the whmovement, a movement of I to C, considering matrix and embedded contexts, taking as a starting point the set of syntactic properties of Northern Italian dialects discussed in Bonan (2021a, 2021b) and in Shlonsky and Bonan (2021). Data from this research was taken from the project entitled “Whquestions on talian and the whin situ and whex situ alternation”, in which semistructured interviews were carried out with bilingual informants of Portuguese/Brazilian Venetian of different ages. The results of this research indicated that Brazilian Venetian is influenced, not only by Northern Italian dialects (such as Trevisan) but also by Brazilian Portuguese. It is expected that this study will contribute to the description and analysis of the Brazilian Venetian, as well as to the theoretical discussion around the problem of languages with alternating whin situ and ex situ.