The role of portuguese acquisition status in the use of the definite article before possessive pronouns in urban mozambican norm

Abstract

This paper examines variation in the use of the definite article before possessive pronouns in the urban variety of Mozambican Portuguese spoken in Maputo. Grounded in the Variationist Sociolinguistic framework, the study analyzes 627 tokens drawn from an oral corpus collected in 2016, contrasting speakers who self-identify Portuguese as L1 and as L2 (with a Bantu L1). The results indicate that, although article presence is the majority variant overall, article absence is productive and systematically constrained. In both groups, type of phrase is the most robust structural predictor, favoring article absence in nominal phrases and disfavoring it in prepositional phrases. Crucially, however, the sociolinguistic architecture of variation differs by acquisition status: among L1 speakers, variation is shaped by a dense interaction of structural, semantic-discursive, and social factors, whereas among L2 speakers it is primarily governed by grammatical and semantic-functional constraints, with limited social constraints. These findings highlight the impact of multilingualism and language contact on variable grammars and contribute to broader discussions of convergence and divergence among varieties of Portuguese.