Liliana Inverno

lilianainverno@gmail.com

 Liliana Inverno graduated in Portuguese and English Studies from the University of Coimbra in 2001. In 2002 she concluded her teaching practice year and taught Portuguese for Foreigners at the Faculty of Arts of this university.

In September 2002, Liliana took her first job as a teacher at the Superior School of Education in Leiria (ESEL), where she taught English for Specific Purposes and English Linguistics. In July and August 2004, thanks to a protocol between ESEL and the Universidade Agostinho Neto in Luanda, she was able to go to Angola to teach Portuguese at the Superior Pedagogical School of Lunda Norte.

During her stay there, Liliana collected a vast amount of data for her masters’ thesis, entitled Angola’s Transition to Vernacular Portuguese, which she wrote under the supervision of Professor John Holm and successfully defended in March 2006 at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra (FLUC). Her research was funded by a masters’ grant granted by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The main goal of her thesis was to explain the social and linguistic mechanisms that led to the emergence and development of Angolan Vernacular Portuguese (AVP). In it, she analizes the sociolinguistic setting in Angola since the early days of contact between Portuguese and the Bantu languages spoken in the country and describes some of the main morphosyntactic features of the noun phrase in AVP.

Liliana has given papers at the annual meetings of the Association for Portuguese and Spanish-based Creoles (ACBLPE) since 2001. She was the secretary of the General Assembly of this association from 2003 to 2007 and co-organized the meetings held at FLUC in June 2001 and 2006. In June 2007, she was elected vice-president of the General Assembly of the ACBLPE.

Liliana is currently working on her PhD dissertation, The Transition to Vernacular Portuguese in Northeastern Interior Angola: the restructuring of Portuguese morphology and syntax in Dundo, which is funded by a PhD grant awarded by the FCT. The dissertation is supervised by Professor John Holm and its main goal is to evaluate the degree of morphosyntactic restructuring of the Portuguese spoken in Dundo, Lunda Norte, as a consequence of language contact in the particular sociolinguistic setting in this part of the Angolan interior. Liliana plans to stay in Dundo from September 2008 to March 2009 to carry out field work.

Her current PhD grant enabled Liliana to study for a semester at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies to carry out bibliographic research and to attend post-graduate seminars on the structure of the Bantu languages and fieldwork techniques as a visiting research student. She was invited to conduct one of the sessions of the Linguistics Research Seminar Series and talk about her research on the restructuring of Portuguese morphosyntax in Angola.

Some of Liliana’s papers and publications are given below. Visitors are welcome to download them but they are not allowed to quote any of them without the written permission of the author/publisher.

PAPERS:

JUNE 2006
University of Coimbra (Portugal)
VI Annual Meeting of the Associação: Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola (ACBLPE)
Title of Paper: ‘The Noun Phrase in Angolan Vernacular Portuguese: evidence for substrate influence’.

JUNE 2005
University of Orléans (France)
V Annual Meeting of the ACBLPE
Title of Paper (with John Holm): ‘The Vernacular Portuguese of Angola and Brazil: partial restructuring of the noun phrase’.

JUNE 2003
University of A Coruña (Spain)
III Annual Meeting of the ACBLPE
Title of the paper: ‘Português vernáculo do Brasil vs. português vernáculo de Angola – reestruturação parcial vs. mudança linguística?’

JUNE 2001
University of Coimbra (Portugal)
Symposium on Creole Languages organized by the Society for Pidgin and Creole Languages (SPCL) and by the ACBLPE
Title of the paper (with Dominika Swolkien): ‘O artigo definido zero em dois contextos específicos no português do Brasil e no crioulo de Cabo Verde’.

PUBLICATIONS:

• forthcoming. A transição de Angola para o português vernáculo: estudo morfossintáctico do sintagma nominal. In Ana Carvalho, ed. Português em contacto. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Editorial Vervuert.

• 2006b. Angola's transition to vernacular Portuguese. Unpublished master's thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra.

• 2004. 'Português vernáculo do Brasil e Português vernáculo de Angola: restruturação parcial vs. mudança linguística?' In M. Fernández, M. Fernández-Ferreiro and N. Vázquez Veiga (eds.) Los Criollos de base ibérica: ACBLPE. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, pp. 201-213. 

• (Janeiro de 2004). Review of Languages in contact: the partial restructuring of vernaculars by John Holm. Rua Larga – Revista da Reitoria da Universidade de Coimbra, 3, 63-64.

• With Dominika Swolkien. 2003. 'O artigo definido zero em dois contextos específicos no Português do Brasil e no Crioulo de CaboVerde', Biblos, pp. 179-192.