Fábio Bonfim Duarte is a guest researcher at the Centre for Linguistics. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He works with Native American Languages, spoken in The Amazonian region, and with Bantu Languages, spoken in Mozambique. He is a field-working linguist with formal training in theoretical linguistics and language documentation & revitalization. He conducts research on the Guajajara, Tembé, Ka’apor, Gavião Pykobye, Maxacali, Tucano, Apãniekra, Apinajé, Terena among other languages. He has also been focusing on the analysis of the Changana Language, spoken in Mozambique. He has worked to build collaborations with the communities of speakers who are working to document, promote, and revitalize these languages. In addition to language documentation and revitalization initiatives, Duarte’s research is focused on variation across human languages, specifically in the domains of syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure). The bigger questions driving his research are: what are the ways that human languages can differ from one another? what are the ways in which they cannot? and what does this tell us about the human capacity for language? To answer these questions, his research has focused primarily on understudied Indigenous languages of the Amazonia, which differ in interesting ways from more commonly-studied languages like English and French. He is especially interested in the topics of ergativity, split ergativity, case and agreement systems, extraction asymmetries, nominalization, word order, object shift, differential object marking, person hierarchy, word order in VSO and predicate fronting languages, focus and conjoint/disjoint alternation in Bantu, mass and count nouns and typology.

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Fields of interest

• Linguistic Diversity
• Language Documentation and Revitalization
• Chomskyan syntax
• Typology
• Agreement
• Case

Research

Fábio Bonfim Duarte is a full Professor of Linguistics and Portuguese Language at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He teaches courses on syntax, morphology and field methods, in addition to introductory-level courses on language and linguistics. His main research interests include syntactic and morphological theory, syntax and morphosyntax of South American languages (Tupí-Guaraní, Jê and Aruák, in particular), as well as syntax and morphosyntax of the Bantu languages that are spoken in Mozambique, such as Nyanja, Shimakonde, Emakhuwa, Xichangana, Xirhonga and Citshwa. Currently, he is researching these languages on the following topics: agreement, case system realization, argument structure, word order, applicative constructions and differential object marking. He is also participating in a project involving the documentation, description and revitalization of these languages. One of the goals of this project is to write a descriptive grammar of the Tenetehára language.

Curriculum Vitae

The curriculum vitae can be found here.

Selected publications

Duarte, Fábio Bonfim & Chamorro, Pilar. 2020. On the semantic of mass and count nouns in Guajajara. In Suzi Lima and Suzan Rothstein (eds), Linguistic Variation, v 20:2, pp.366-381.

Duarte, Fábio Bonfim. 2018. Clausal recursion, predicate raising and head-finality in Tenetehára. In Andrew Nevins, Luiz Amaral, Marcus Maia & Thomas Roeper (eds), Recursion across borders and beyond, 143–165. Cambridge: CUP.

Duarte, Fábio Bonfim; Ngunga, Armindo Saúl Atelela & Camargos, Quesler Fagundes. 2016. Differential object marking in Mozambican languages. In Doris L. Payne, Sara Pacchiarotti & Mokaya Bosire (eds.), Diversity in African languages, 333–354. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.17169/langsci.b121.489

Duarte, Fábio  Bonfim. 2012. Tenetehára: A predicate-fronting language. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne De Linguistique, 57(3). 359–386. Cambridge University Press.

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