Case and agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: Between Bantu and Romance
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This chapter presents some syntactic peculiarities of Brazilian Portuguese which
differentiate it from European Portuguese and, from a typological point of view, put
it apart in the Romance and even in the Indo-European domain. We argue that this
is due to the influence of the African languages (mostly from the Bantu subgroup)
that were taken to Brazil by the slave trade during three centuries. We propose
that this change affected T(ense), more exactly T’s EPP condition, which ceased to
be φ-dependent, with the consequence that SpecTP became an A-bar position. On
the basis of the criteria proposed by Sheehan & van der Wal (2018), we discuss the
status of syntactic Case in Brazilian Portuguese and depart from a previous analysis
that argued that, in this language, DPs could enter the derivation without a case
feature. In the analysis proposed in this chapter, Case and EPP nicely combine to
account for the facts considered.