The PALMA Corpora of African Varieties of Portuguese

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5047–5053 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5047 The PALMA Corpora of African Varieties of Portuguese Tjerk Hagemeijer, Amália Mendes, Rita Gonçalves, Catarina Cornejo, Raquel Madureira, Michel Généreux University of Lisbon, School of Arts and Humanities, Centre of Linguistics {t.hagemeijer, amaliamendes, ritamgg}@letras.ulisboa.pt, catarinacornejo@gmail.com raquelmadureira@edu.ulisboa.pt, michel.genereux@claurendeau.qc.ca Abstract We present three new corpora of urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, where Portuguese is increasingly being spoken as first and second language in different multilingual settings. Given the scarcity of linguistic resources available for the African varieties of Portuguese, these corpora provide new, contemporary data for the study of each variety and for comparative research on African, Brazilian and European varieties, hereby improving our understanding of processes of language variation and change in postcolonial societies. The corpora consist of transcribed spoken data, complemented by a rich set of metadata describing the setting of the audio recordings and sociolinguistic information about the speakers. They are annotated with POS and lemma information and made available on the CQPweb platform, which allows for sophisticated data searches. The corpora are already being used for comparative research on constructions in the domain of possession and location involving the argument structure of intransitive, monotransitive and ditransitive verbs that select Goals, Locatives, and Recipients. Keywords: comparable spoken corpora, African varieties of Portuguese, language variation and change 1. Introduction After the independences in the 1970s, the former Portuguese colonies in Africa adopted the standard of European Portuguese as their exclusive official language. Ever since, there has been an increasing body of work on the African varieties of Portuguese (AVPs), in particular on the Angolan and Mozambican varieties, a tendency which accompanies a more generalized interest in postcolonial varieties and language acquisition, variation, and change (e.g., Álvarez López et al., 2018; Gonçalves, 2010; Mesthrie and Bhatt, 2008).1 Despite this tendency, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of AVPs, since in-depth research is often concentrated on a relatively small number of linguistic domains or features (e.g., number agreement, clitics, argument structure) and mostly restricted to single varieties or subvarieties. Language contact with Bantu and creole languages is frequently considered to be the driving force behind the observed patterns. This type of conclusion, however, is often the consequence of a methodology which strongly focuses on the patterns diverging from European Portuguese, the exclusive official language adopted by the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, and hereby often overlooks the substantial group and individual variation that characterizes these varieties, including convergence with standard European Portuguese (cf. section 6 for some examples).2 While an important set of contemporary corpora for the Brazilian and European variety of Portuguese is available3, few searchable resources are (publicly) available for the AVPs (cf. section 2), which is particularly striking if we consider that Angola and Mozambique are and will 1 The linguistic research on AVPs has been compiled and is frequently updated …

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