Abstract
This paper is about the semantics and the syntax of aspectual verbs in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Some of these verbs select a+Infinitive in the European variety whereas the same verbs select that structure and Gerund in the Brazilian variety. We show that this discrepancy can be explained in semantic and syntactic grounds due to the different nature of the semantic ‘input’ (stative or eventive), the availability of tense constructions and the functional structure of the embedded domain. Another group of aspectual verbs do not differ in their syntactic structure in the two varieties as their structure (de+Infinitive) is the same, although syntactically different from a+ Infinitive, but they do differ in their semantics and also in the selection of different verbs.
Highlights
The main goal of this paper is to articulate the semantic and syntactic characterization of aspectual verbs in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP)
Occurrences of Clitic Climbing24 and no occurrence of SE passive in adjacency to the aspectuals estar, começar or continuar. This means that in BP the infinitival complement contains the necessary and sufficient functional heads to license the features of the embedded verb, avoiding, in a high percentage of cases, the formation of the complex predicate
4.2 The syntax of ‘de + Inf’ constructions In the preceding section, we have shown that interesting semantic contrasts between EP and BP can be found in the group of aspectual verbs that select de + Inf
Summary
The main goal of this paper is to articulate the semantic and syntactic characterization of aspectual verbs in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). These verbs occur in two different structures in both varieties: 1. A + Infinitive (Inf) / Gerund (Ger); 2.
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