Parallelisms in language contact

the spanglish and portunhol interlinguistic relationship

Abstract

The present work aims to study and analyse the possible relationship in the language-contact sphere based upon a comparative focus between Spanglish, in the United States of America, and Portunhol, mainly in the border comprising Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Thus, based on this hypothesis, we will study and observe the different linguistic resources and mechanisms of each of the two varieties and the possible interlinguistic relations between them, or, in other words, which processes predominate in each one and in which situations they appear. Since there is no established grammar on both varieties (ENGHELS; VAN BELLEGHEN; VANDE CASTEELE, 2020), we will focus specifically on observing the appearance and functioning of lexical loans (OTHEGUY, 2009) and code-switching (Montes- Alcalá, 2005; Hammink, 2000) in Portunhol, basing the research on the main resources extracted from the Spanglish linguistic classification in Tugues Rodríguez (2019). As a result, so as to compare and observe the linguistic correlation of the two languages, we intend to create a corpus by selecting samples of the literary work in Portunhol called Era uma vez en la Fronteira Selvagem (2019) by the Brazilian-Paraguayan writer Douglas Diegues. This corpus will provide us with all those samples in Portunhol to a better understanding of all the resources and compare these samples with the theoretical foundations of Spanglish. Finally, the results of the research will give us the answers to know which linguistic practices in the two modalities are more recurrent, which resources are considered more legitimate and, more importantly, they will prove the existence of a continuum of similarity between Spanish / Portuguese and English / Spanish.