The drift/contact debate in the history of brazilian portuguese

Abstract

This paper resumes the debate over the prevalence of the drift factor, considered as strictly internal, or the contact factor, considered as strictly external in the constitution of Brazilian Portuguese. On the empirical level, it focuses on the contact with Bantu languages. On the theoretical level, the resumption favors the epistemological bases of cognitive linguistics, where the adequacy of two new branches is under discussion: a cognitive contact linguistics and a cognitive sociolinguistics. This paper recapitulates the association between contact and creolization in order to dissociate them; it rejects the thesis that contact is restrict to lexical influence, with a view to associating the drift/contact dichotomy to the lexicon/grammar dichotomy; and it proposes a contact hypothesis based on domain-general processes. Reformulating the debate in these terms leads to the conclusion that contact motivates compatibilization among conceptualizations, for the matter being of cognition contact, not language contact.