<jats:p>In research on African varieties of Portuguese, especially Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese, it is often referred that Goal arguments of verbs of movement show a tendency to be headed by locative preposition em ‘in’, contrasting with the use of a ‘to’ and para ‘to, toward’ in European Portuguese. Language contact is generally considered the primary factor with respect to the use of the noncanonical pattern. Using spoken corpora of the urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican and Santomean Portuguese, this paper develops a case-study of Goal arguments that occur with two frequently used verbs of inherently directed motion, ir ‘to go’ and chegar ‘to arrive’, to assess the contact-induced hypothesis and to explore alternative, semantic-based hypotheses. Overall, a cross-comparison of the varieties at stake and their main contact languages shows that the role of language contact is limited at best. A semantic analysis of em, on the other hand, shows promising results, since the occurrence of this preposition is favored by NPs that denote an entity with well-defined boundaries and is sensitive to the lexical semantics of the verbs, i.e., whether the verb describes a durative or non-durative change of place, and to the type of eventuality described by the predication.</jats:p>