When place matters: The variable use of the prepositions “a” and “en” with verbs of movement by Brazilian speakers

Abstract

In Brazilian Portuguese there is variation of a/para/em in sentences with verbs that express movement to a place (go, arrive, come, among others). It is a non-normative variation, since the grammatical tradition prescribes, for these verbs, the selection of directional prepositions a/para; however, in the colloquial speech of Brazil, the locative preposition em alternates with the directional ones, and this variation is not free, but motivated by semantic and pragmatic reasons that account for how speakers conceive of the event to which they refer. This alternation observed in Brazilian Portuguese seems to occur also in statements in Spanish produced by Brazilian speakers, and it becomes noticeable when they select the preposition in contexts equivalent to those in which the variant em in Portuguese would prevail. This work deals with a group of texts written in Spanish by Brazilian Portuguese speakers who are studying Spanish or already have some degree of performance in this language, records the alternating use of prepositions a/en and their meanings in the described contexts, and analyzes whether the variables that motivate the selection of one or the other preposition in Spanish are the same as those that operate in Portuguese.