Empirical study of verbs and prepositions in European Portuguese with recourse to Web/Text Minning (original) (raw)
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On Verb Movement in Brazilian Portuguese: A Cartographic Study
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The durative verbs of Portuguese / Os verbos durativos do português
Diacrítica, 29(1), 27-59, 2015
In this paper, I discuss the expression of duration and temporal location via predicate-argument combinations in Portuguese. The focus is on what we can term "durative verbs"-like the counterparts of English last, spend and take (corresponding in Portuguese to at least six extremely common verbs: "durar", "prolongar-se", "arrastar-se", "passar", "levar" and "demorar") -, which exhibit a few intriguing grammatical idiosyncrasies. Corpora data from European and Brazilian Portuguese will be used, in an attempt to show that the constructions under analysis reveal a considerable amount of variation and are prone to (linguistic change-evincive) anomaly, having to do mainly with the use of temporal prepositions or preposition-like connectives. Formal analyses - to be made within the Discourse Representation Theory framework - are also presented. These are meant to underline that the semantic contribution of homonymous elements may be variable across different construction patterns, which undoubtedly correlates with their somewhat unstable grammatical behaviour in contemporary Portuguese.
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This paper discusses perception and causative verbs in English and European Portuguese within ChomskyÕs (2000ChomskyÕs ( , 2001 Agree framework and provides an answer for the old riddle of why these verbs appear to select for different infinitival complements in their active and passive forms. Assuming that infinitival clauses are Case-bearing projections , the paper proposes that in active structures, the infinitival head and the embedded subject can both agree with the matrix light verb and so ''share'' the accusative Case it licenses. In passive structures, on the other hand, the intervening /-features of the participial head block the agreement between the finite T and the infinitival head, which will then be licensed only if preposition insertion is sanctioned as a Last Resort repair strategy.