A estrutura sintática das chamadas construções resultativas em PB

Abstract

BARBOSA, Julio William Curvelo. The syntactic structure of the so-called “BP resultative constructions”. 2008. 134pp. Thesis (Master’s Degree) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciencias Humanas, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, 2008. In this work, we take up again the discussion of whether resultative constructions exist in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as discussed in the works of Foltran (1999), Marcelino (2000) and Lobato (2004), inter alia, presenting theoretical and empirical evidence against the claim that there are resultative constructions in BP that are syntactically or semantically equivalent to resultative constructions from languages such as English, for instance. Based on works about English’s resultative construction such as Hoekstra (1988) and Levin & Rappaport-Hovav (1995), we show that the basic properties of these constructions in English are quite distinct from the properties of the constructions mentioned by the works about BP. With a criterion which takes on the properties of resultative constructions in English, we show that there is semantic difference as for the type of modification applied by the resultative predicate over the sentence when comparing English and BP, considering the neoDavidsonian event semantics (PARSONS, 1990); while English’s resultative predicate denotes the action’s resultant state, in BP the secondary predicate is, in fact, the modifier of the resultant state already denoted by the semantic content expressed by the complex verb+internal argument. Based on Talmy’s (2000) typology, we relate his proposal of impossibility of conflation of certain semantic elements to the verb in romance languages to the impossibility of resultative construction formation in these languages. Unable to conflate manner to the verb, BP realizes, instead of manner, the cause semantics conflated to the verb’s co-event, while English realizes the resultant state on a satellite, and manner and cause are conflated into the verb. From the results obtained with our semantic analysis, we conduct a syntactic analysis that explains the manner conflation restriction in BP, as well as its inability to form resultative constructions. Based on the argument structure theory from Hale & Keyser (2002), we suggest a complex predicate structure for English’s resultatives from the deadjectival verb structures, responsible for the formation of the unaccusative verbs. The restriction over the formation of these predicates in BP is explained by the negative setting of the Compounding Parameter in this language (SNYDER, 1995), thus not allowing the insertion of open-class lexical items (roots) into positions marked with the [+Afixal] feature, a sine qua non condition for the resultative predicate formation, such as English’s resultative predicates.