Kato, Mary AizawaMartins, Ana Maria2018-01-292018-01-292016Kato, Mary A. & Ana Maria Martins 2016. European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese: an overview on word order. In: Leo Wetzels, Sergio Menuzzi & João Costa (eds.), The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 15-40.http://hdl.handle.net/10451/31197The two main varieties of Portuguese are European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the official languages of Portugal and Brazil. With the advent of the Principles and Parameters theory and the revival of historical and comparative grammar in Portugal and in Brazil, linguists have started to reveal parametric differences between the two varieties, and not merely phonological and lexical distinctions, which would define the two varieties as merely two dialects of the same language. According to Tarallo (1993) the main changes that gave rise to Brazilian Portuguese started to appear clearly by the end of the 19th century in written language, but were probably already there in the spoken modality since the end of the 18th century, when the social and historical factors were favorable to the changes. This chapter will present a comparative description of word order in the two varieties, starting, in section 2, with the surface similarities which underlie most of the mutual comprehension between the Portuguese and the Brazilians. Section 3, will describe a major difference in the grammar of the two varieties, namely the placement of clitic pronouns. Section 4 will describe the particularities of word order in declarative sentences. Section 5 will deal with word order differences in wh-questions and contrastive focus structures. We will finish with some conclusions.engbook part