| Summary: | In this paper, I present an analysis of data on initial aquisition of Portuguese as second language by six children living in a Japanese-Brazilian community in Brazil. These children speak only Japanese as their mother tongue, until school age. In this study, the principles and parameters model of generative grammar theory (Chomsky 1981, 1988) has been used together with studies on language transfer (Odlin 1989). I have chosen to investigate a syntactic phenomenon which distinguishes the Japanese and the Portuguese languages: the parameter of linearity (that is, word order). According to this parameter, in Japanese the phrase head is in final position and
in Portuguese it is in initial position. I show that, in this initial stage of second language acquisition, children transfer the head-last parameter of Japanese to Portuguese, when
they are producing noun phrases (NP ® N + complement) and verbal phrases (VP ® V + complement). The evidence presented contradicts other studies which deny the existence of language transfer at all (Dulay e Burt 1974; Dulay, Burt e Krashen 1982), and those who deny it mainly at the syntactic level (Felix 1978; Paradis and Genesee 1996).
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