Challenges for the teaching of Portuguese as a Second Language in a context of language change: the case of third person possessive pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Third person possessive pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), seu and dele, have been the subject of several works in Linguistics, since they have interesting syntactic and semantic characteristics. Their use can be ambiguous, even for native speakers. For instance, in a sentence such as Encontrei a Maria e ela estava corn a sua irma CI saw Maria and she was with her sister'), the reference for seu is ambiguous between 2nd and 3rd person singular for Brazilians. Therefore, this ambiguity, as well as the possible solutions for this problem, should be dealt with when teaching Portuguese as a second language (PL2). The aim of this paper is to analyze the fact that PL2 textbooks and BP prescriptive grammars, such as Bechara (2002 [1961]), do not have clear explanations of the subject and there are no mentions of any linguistic studies on possessives (MULLER, 1997; MENUZZI, 1999, 2003a, 2003b; TORRES MORAIS; RIBEIRO, 2014). Thus, the aim of this paper is to discuss how this phenomenon can be introduced into the PL2 teaching environment.