On the use of comparable corpora of African varieties of Portuguese for linguistic description and teaching/learning applications

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the use of five comparable corpora of African varieties of Portuguese (AVP), namely Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe, for multiple contrastive linguistic analyses and for the production of teaching and learning applications. Five contrastive lexicons have been corpus-extracted and further annotated with POS and lemma information and have been crucial to establish for each variety a core and peripheral vocabulary. Studies on AVP-specific morphological processes and on variation in verb complementation will also be discussed. These are first steps towards an integrated description of the five varieties and towards the elaboration of teaching and learning materials to be used by teachers of students from those five African countries with Portuguese as official language.