Key research themes
1. How is the Portuguese language transmitted and maintained as a heritage language in immigrant communities?
This research area investigates the transmission, preservation, and identity-related challenges of Portuguese as a heritage language among immigrant families living in non-Portuguese majority countries, particularly focusing on Brazilian Portuguese speakers in Spain. It examines parental strategies and attitudes, institutional support, and the socio-cultural factors affecting heritage language retention and identity formation. Understanding these dynamics is crucial to language maintenance policies, pedagogical approaches, and sociolinguistic integration of immigrant populations.
2. What phonological and syntactic variations characterize African varieties of Portuguese and how do language contact and internal linguistic factors shape them?
This theme explores the distinctive phonological and syntactic features of Portuguese spoken in African countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It includes investigations into prosodic phenomena like intonation patterns of interrogatives and relative clause formation, assessing whether these varieties conform to European Portuguese norms or manifest localized innovations shaped by substrate languages and sociolinguistic contexts. The research advances understanding of language contact effects, nativization processes, and intra-varietal diversity in Portuguese as an emerging lingua franca in multilingual African settings.
3. How are digital and computational tools advancing Portuguese language resources for linguistic and educational applications?
This research theme focuses on the development and application of digital corpora, valency dictionaries, and automatic generation tools for Portuguese and related languages such as Galician. It assesses the design, methodology, and efficacy of NLP resources like online searchable corpora with morphosyntactic tagging and automatic nominal phrase generators. These tools facilitate linguistic analysis, language teaching, lexicography, and natural language processing tasks. Enhancing resource accessibility and linguistic data quality supports research as well as practical educational and technological developments in Portuguese.