Verbal alternations in brazilian Portuguese: a lexical semantic approach
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Márcia Cançado [1]
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[1] Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Brasil
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- Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 3, Nº. 1, 2010, págs. 77-112
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This paper discusses two types of verbal alternation in Brazilian Portuguese that have the same profiled syntactic structure, but differ in their semantic representations and in their lexical syntactic structures. The first case is O dentista extraiu o dente do João ‘The dentist extracted John’s tooth’, alternating with O João extraiu o dente ‘João extracted his tooth’. We can interpret the alternate sentence as meaning that João had someone extract his tooth. The second case is Alguém quebrou o braço do João ‘Someone broke John’s arm’, alternating with João quebrou o braço ‘João broke his arm’. We can interpret the alternate sentence as João being the possessor of the arm that suffers the break. Based on a more fine-grained approach of thematic roles, and based on a semantic representation of the events encoded by these verbs, I show here that these two forms have different interpretations due to different lexical semantic properties. Besides, these lexical semantic differences, encoded in the root elements of the verbs, are responsible for projecting distinct lexical syntactic structures.
