Recipient Passives and the Nativisation of Portuguese in Mozambique

Abstract The present study explores the nativisation process of Mozambican Portuguese through the prism of one innovative construction, Recipient passives, that emerged out of contact with local Bantu languages (Firmino, 2024). More specifically, it provides fresh insights regarding the social distribution of such passives and the influence of language contact on their formation. The paper adopts a constructional approach to language change and challenges the derivational link often established between Recipient passives and Double Object constructions (Gonçalves, 2010; Gonçalves et al., 2022). This study uses experimental data from an acceptability judgement task collected in Mozambique among university students. It will be shown that Recipient passives display high acceptability ratings across participants’ profiles, regardless of their region of origin and first language, and that language contact no longer seems to directly influence the use of these passives, providing evidence that Recipient passives have become an indigenised feature of MP .