Construções de tópico marcado na escrita de falantes de herança de português brasileiro

This paper aims to investigate marked topic constructions (CTs) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as Heritage Language. These constructions are a syntactic phenomenon used as a grammatical device “to promote a referent on the Topic Acceptability Scale from accessible to active status” (Lambrecht 1994, p. 183). To achieve this aim, we will analyse a series of CTs, namely topicalization, right-dislocation, hanging topicalization and left-dislocation in their role as maintenance structures in a written corpus of heritage speakers of BP. The methodological approach adopted here considers some of the syntactic changes typical of neo-standard BP, such as the change of the pro-drop parameter (Duarte 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000) and the features of BP as a Subject-Prominent and Topic-Prominent language, progressively moving away from other Romance languages like French or European Portuguese (Berlinck et al. 2009; Vasco 2007; Orsini, Vasco 2007; Orsini 2020).