"Here is Kalunga!": Socio-historical and syntactic aspects of the Kalunga grammar and the emergence of defined locative subjects.
Quilombo Kalunga; Comunidade de Vão de Almas; Minimalist Program; Pronominal split; Socio-history of Brazilian Portuguese; Pronominal locative subject.
This thesis focuses on the study of innovative constructions in Brazilian Portuguese, in which definite locative pronouns are licensed in preverbal position, such as "Aqui é Kalunga" (Here is Kalunga!). The data under consideration were primarily collected in the rural quilombola community of Kalunga do Vão de Almas, located in Goiás. The research aims to analyze syntactic aspects of the Kalunga community, comparing them with other dialects spoken in Afro-descendant rural communities. The goal is to gain a clearer understanding of the typology of this linguistic variety of Brazilian Portuguese, as well as to describe and explain the syntactic and semantic behavior of this specific type of locative construction in preverbal position, featuring locative subjects (such as "aqui" and "aí") with definite interpretation, contextually recovered. This type of construction has not been attested or analyzed in the literature on subject syntax in Brazilian Portuguese. The proposed analysis is based on the theoretical framework of Generative Grammar, specifically the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 2000), and the hypotheses presented by Pilati, Naves, and Salles (2017a) regarding the split in the inflectional paradigm and the emergence of locative pronouns in preverbal subject position in Brazilian Portuguese, resulting from a process of linguistic change related to the loss of null subjects (cf. Duarte, 1995). Given the socio-historical and cultural characteristics that permeate the mentioned community, this investigation also addresses other objectives, namely: discussing aspects of Kalunga's socio-history and its linguistic contacts, and providing an overview of linguistic phenomena present in Kalunga speech, comparing them with other varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. In support of Mattos' proposal (2019), the analyses conducted demonstrate that Kalunga speech does not exhibit traces of geographic and linguistic isolation, contradicting the thesis that the Kalunga remained completely isolated for nearly 300 years until being "discovered" by anthropologist Mari Baiocchi in the 1980s.