Como-gerund clauses in European Portuguese: figuring out the riddle

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2024

Authors

Leal, António (Author) FLUP; Lobo, Maria (Author) Other; Silvano, Maria da Purificação (Author) FLUP

Journal

Title: Isogloss

Vol. 10 No. 3

Publisher: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Indexing

Scopus

ERIH Plus

Crossref

DOAJ

SHERPA/RoMEO

Worldcat OCLC

MIAR

Dialnet

Other information

DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.329

Abstract (EN): Previous literature on the typology of gerund clauses in Portuguese has overlooked a peculiar type of clauses which are always introduced by como (‘as’) and display an array of characteristics that set them apart from all other gerund clauses (and from other, somehow similar, constructions in different languages). In this paper, we provide an in-depth syntactic and semantic characterisation of these como-gerund clauses and the contexts in which they arise, highlighting their similarities and differences regarding other constructions, namely resultative and depictive secondary predicates. We put forward a proposal to deal with their syntactic configurations and the restrictions they exhibit. We also propose that como is obligatory in these clauses because it marks a type-shift operation, which gives como gerund clauses a predicative interpretation, usually found in the nominal domain.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 29