Back to the margins in search of the core: "Foreign Land"'s geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial center, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift which provides a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Rather than as a former empire, Portugal is defined by its situation at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of “core” or “center” are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogue combines Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Back to the margins in search of the core: foreign land's geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial centre, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift aimed at providing a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Even Portugal is defined by its location at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of ‘core’ or ‘centre’ are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogues combine Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Heritage speaker competence differences, language change and input type: inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese

It has been argued that colloquial dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have undergone significant linguistic change resulting in the loss of inflected infinitives (e.g., Pires, 2002, 2006). Since BP adults, at least educated ones, have complete knowledge of inflected infinitives, the implicit claim is that they are transmitted via formal education in the standard dialect. In the present article, I test one of the latent predictions of such claims; namely, the fact that heritage speakers of BP who lack formal education in the standard dialect should never develop native-like knowledge of inflected infinitives. In doing so, I highlight two significant implications (a) that heritage speaker grammars are a good source for testing dialectal variation and language change proposals and (b) incomplete acquisition and/or attrition are not the only sources of heritage language competence differences. Employing the syntactic and semantic tests of Rothman and Iverson (2007), I compare heritage speakers' knowledge to Rothman and Iverson's advanced adult L2 learners and educated native controls. Unlike the latter groups, the data for heritage speakers indicate that they do not have target knowledge of inflected infinitives, lending support to Pires' claims, suggesting that literacy plays a significant role in the acquisition of this grammatical property in BP.

Projecting social and discursive identities through code-switching on facebook: the case of Greek Cypriots

Two varieties of Greek are spoken on the island of Cyprus: the local dialect, namely the Greek-Cypriot Dialect (GCD), and Standard Modern Greek (SMG). English is also influential, as Cyprus was an English colony until 1960. The dialect is rarely employed for everyday written purposes; however, it is now evident in computer-mediated communication (CMC). As a contribution to the field of code-switching in writing, this study examines how Greek-Cypriot internet users employ GCD, SMG, and English in their Facebook interactions. In particular, we investigate how identities (discursive and social) are performed and indexed through the linguistic choices of Greek-Cypriot internet users. The findings indicate that switches to GCD add a humorous tone and express solidarity and informality. SMG is mostly used for ‘official’ statements, and it is preferred by mature internet users, while English is used with expressions of affect and evaluative comments.