XVII Colloquium on Generative Grammar – Girona, 13th-15th June 2007
Subject-verb agreement in Brazilian and European Portuguese: the case of the partitive
constructions and complex DPs
Mirian Santos de Cerqueira ([email protected])
New University of Lisbon/ Federal University of Alagoas
The main aim of this talk is to analyse the establishment or not of the overt morphologically
agreement between the DP subcategorized by the preposition (P) which is head of an PP included into
the subject DP and the verbal inflection in declarative structures with partitive expressions (see
examples in (1) ). Besides, one intends to do a distinction between this type of agreement and another
that is established in constructions with complex DPs (see examples in (2)). As it is known, in the
literature on the verbal agreement, the Brazilian Portuguese Grammar (henceforth BP) and European
Portuguese Grammar (henceforth EP) can license two types of number feature marking
(singular/plural) for partitive constructions (Peres & Móia, 1995). This marking takes the inflection to
agree either with the head of the subject or with the DP subcategorized by the P which is head of an
included PP into the subject DP. In this paper, concerning to complex DPs, one defends the following
hypothesis: there exist morphological and/or semantic constraints for the establishment of the
agreement in BP, but not in EP because this type of agreement would be ungrammatical. Therefore,
this talk aims to compare, initially, finite declarative sentences in BP and EP which are results of
native speakers’ judgment of grammaticality, with the objective of detecting similarities and/or
differences with relation to the manifestation of the verbal agreement into the grammars of the two
languages. To develop this research, the analysis bases itself on Minimalist Program framework
(Chomsky, 1999) taking into account more specifically the operation Agree. In this analysis, one puts
in question the notions of Probe and Goal and discusses the validity or not of a research that only
takes a strictly syntactic approach. Furthermore, one starts comparing the results of Rodrigues (2006),
concerning to the processing of the agreement in the two types of structures mentioned in BP, with the
results concerning to EP, to verify similarities, differences and implications for a more general study
of agreement about the grammars of the two languages in question.
Examples
Overt morphologically agreement with partitive expressions:
(1)
a.
A maioria dos alunos fizeram o trabalho.
the most of students do-PAST.3PL. the homework.
‘The most of students did the homework’.
b.
Uma parte dos professores compareceram à reunião.
a part of the teachers attend-PAST.3PL. the meeting
‘A part of the teachers attended the meeting’.
XVII Colloquium on Generative Grammar – Girona, 13th-15th June 2007
Overt morphologically agreement with complex DPs:
(2)
a.
A vida das pessoas são importantes.
the life of people be-PRES.3PL. important-PL.
‘The life of people is important’.
b.
A troca de conhecimentos acontecem em grupo.
the exchange of knowledges happen-PRES.3PL. in group.
‘The exchange of knowledges happens in group’.
References
CHOMSKY, N. Derivation by phase. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, n. 18, Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1999.
PERES, J. A.; MÓIA, T. Áreas críticas da Língua Portuguesa. 2. ed. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho,
1995.
PEREIRA, S. M. B. Gramática comparada de “a gente”: variação no português europeu. Dissertação
(Mestrado em Gramática Comparada) – Universidade de Lisboa. Lisboa, 2003.
RODRIGUES, E. S. O processamento da concordância de número entre sujeito e verbo na produção
de sentenças. (Tese de Doutoramento). Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Rio
de Janeiro, 2006.