Agradecimentos: The results presented here are part of two research projects financed by FAPESP (The Sao Paulo Research Foundation): Portuguese in time and space: linguistic contact, grammar competition and parametric change (2012/06078-9) and Locative and directional constituents in Afro-varieties of Portuguese and Spanish (13/07112-9). We are very grateful to Alan Baxter and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining shortcomings of this article are entirely our responsibility Ver menos

Abstract: In this chapter, we will focus on two set of changes reported in the literature on African and Brazilian varieties of Portuguese: (i) new uses of prepositions in directional complements of motion verbs and (ii) the emergence of ter ('to have')as a prototypically existential verb. Some facts involved in both changes will be presented to argue that there is a single factor responsible for triggering them in African and Brazilian Portuguese varieties: the transference of grammatical properties of phrases interpreted as locative from Bantu languages to Portuguese, with effects on the syntactic behavior of constituents introduced by the preposition em ('in, at, on') Ver menos