Led by Prof. Scott Schwenter, Professor of Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics and CLAS Director, this two-hour workshop will examine the main points of divergence between the grammatical structures of Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Participants will gain experience in comparative/contrastive linguistic analysis and learn to identify potential sites of difficulty in the two languages. Specific topics will include the pronoun system, tense/aspect/mood, and word order. Attendees will be encouraged to participate actively during the session by asking questions and sharing their own personal strategies for teaching grammatical contrasts.
Dr. Scott Schwenter is a variationist sociolinguist and pragmaticist, working on grammatical issues in both Spanish and Portuguese, including comparative aspects of the two languages. His work is corpus-based, and features multivariate statistical analysis of broad-scale patterns across different varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Dr. Schwenter is primarily interested in the contextual conditioning of linguistic variables, and why speakers choose to express things in a given way when they are faced with multiple options for conveying the same content. His most recent work has focused on the pronominal systems of both Spanish and Portuguese and also on negation in Romance languages more generally.
