A Cupópia do Cafundó : uma análise morfossintática

The present study analyzes the speech of the Afro-Brazilian rural community of Cafundo, located 150 km from Sao Paulo. Between 1978 and 1988, when the analyzed data were collected, the community had a population of 80 people, descendants of two former slaves, who were sisters and inherited the lands of their owner. In a book published in 1996, Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry (with the collaboration of Robert Slenes) argue that the variety denominated Cupopia presents structures of regional Portuguese, and that part of the vocabulary is of Bantu origin. The present paper focuses on morphosintactic aspects and discusses copula omission, the use of copula instead of the possessive verb, unexpected word order in Portuguese, nouns without determinant in subject position, the use of definite articles in prepositional prepositional phrases functioning as adjectival locutions, as well as the variable agreement in the noun phrases and the agreement between the subject and the verb. The results indicate that the grammatical features of Cupopia do not fully coincide with those observed in the Portuguese spoken by the same individuals, but are shared with more restructured linguistic varieties than the ones spoken in rural areas of the interior of the State of Sao Paulo.