Linguateca's infrastructure for Portuguese and how it allows the detailed study of language varieties

In this paper I present briefly Linguateca, an infrastructure project for Portuguese which is ten years old, and will show how it provides several possibilities to study grammatical and semantical differences between varieties of the language. After a short history of Portuguese corpus linguistics, presenting the main projects in the area, I discuss in some detail the AC/DC project (Santos & Bick, 2000), the Floresta Sintáctica treebank (Afonso et al., 2002, Freitas et al., 2008, Bick, 2004), and sketch some ideas for parallel corpora as started in CorTrad (Tagnin et al., 2009). I will use three different kinds of examples: those related to known differences between variants, in both grammar and lexis, those related to diachronic differences, in that respect describing in detail Silva (2008, in press) model of Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics in CONDIVport, and those that are in a way corpus-driven and for which novel functionalities of AC/DC have been devised, namely the comparison of two search expressions; and the pattern database.