HISTORICAL-COGNITIVE BORDERS IN THE SPANISH-PORTUGUESE INTERFACES: FALSE COGNATES, INTERLINGUA AND PORTUÑOL

Abstract

This work deals with an old question in the Portuguese-Spanish interfaces: the problem of false cognates. Indeed, the most celebrated studies published so far-among others:  Lado (1973), Leiva (1994), Burgueño Miranda (1998), Durao (2002;2004; 2005) - almost always focused on this topic from communicative or interactionist, that is, the authors made an effort to explain what were the consequences, in speech, of the existence of this phenomenon, especially incident in the interlanguage of the speakers of the respective opposing languages. In this way, we propose a new vision of this phenomenon, cognitively characterizing the interlanguage process in the mind of the speaker, discussing the widespread concept of portuñol, differentiating three different fields of application and, finally, we offer, following our already anticipated proposals in other works (Miranda Poza, 2013; 2015), the explanation of the pair "rato (Spanish)/ rato (Portuguese)" from the historical perspective, a forgotten approach in the analysis of this type of linguistic facts.