External possession in portuguese

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2018

Authors

Duarte, Inês (Author) Other; Oliveira, Fátima (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: Verbs, movement and prepositions

Pages: 75-102

ISBN: 978-989-54104-5-3

Publisher: Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Letras : Universidade do Porto. Centro de Linguística

Scientific classification

CORDIS: Humanities > language sciences

Other information

Abstract (EN): In this paper we look at external possession structures in Portuguese, which shares some properties with other Romance languages, but shows a much wider range of possessor datives as they are not restricted to human possessors and are possible even with state verbs. Possessor raising structures were also considered and we show that they are restricted to the transitive, non-causative variant of Agent/Possessor Alternation verbs. In order to understand why the external possession structures common to Romance involve part-whole relations and present the event as a change that affects the possessor, we consider the properties of affectees in terms of Proto-Roles, the characterization of the part-whole relation as the semantic R-integrated relation, and an Affectedness hierarchy defined in terms of a scalar structure measuring the degree of change suffered by the object of the verb. As for Portuguese external possession structures which depart from the ones found in more restrictive Romance languages, it is suggested that their analysis requires making assumptions about the internal structure of the affected Theme when possessum and possessor hold a part-whole relation and about the grammaticalization of the affected feature in some languages. We suggest that Portuguese encodes affectedness in a functional head of the v-V system and we assume that this head, of aspectual nature, is a complement of v, selects VP as its complement, and, following Fernández-Alcalde (2014: 81) for Spanish, ¿plays a double role: semantically, it is the locus of the affected interpretation found in the dative argument; syntactically, this head is responsible for dative case assignment to the DP via agreement¿.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific