Use of adverbs of place in Portuguese by native speakers of German: analysis of interlanguag

Abstract

In Portuguese, the meaning of the adverbs of place “aqui”, “cá”, “aí”, “ali” and “lá” is defined by the position of the object of reference in relation to the speaker or his interlocutor: “aqui” and “cá” denote proximity to the speaker; “aí” indicates proximity to the interlocutor; and “ali” and “lá” imply distance from both the speaker and the interlocutor (Blühdorn, 2003). Due to the semantics of these adverbs, however, not all of them have equivalents in German. This research sought, through an interlinguistic analysis based on data collected in remote interviews with German speakers learning Portuguese, to identify whether the participants favor the use of some adverbs over others in oral communication and which grammatical deviations are more frequent. The results indicate that the respondents used the adverbs “aqui” and “lá” more frequently, with the main deviations referring to the inappropriate use of the adverb “lá” in place of “aí”. The data shows that experience with the Portuguese language, such as learning time, does not seem to have an impact on the frequency of use and deviations of adverbs of place. In conclusion, the data from this research is relevant both to the field of Portuguese as an additional language and to contrastive applied linguistics, since it sheds light on the specificities of the interlanguage between the German-Portuguese linguistic pair and allows explanations for the deviations committed to be sought based on semantic and interlinguistic analyses of the use of these adverbs in Portuguese (Blühdorn, 2005).