Ana Maria Martins

Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal · Linguistics Department / Faculdade de Letras (FLUL)

Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language in the world, and due to recent interest in comparative syntax, the literature on its syntax has increased exponentially, resulting in exciting discoveries of a range of aspects that have hitherto been overlooked. This book provides a theoretically grounded overview of the major syntactic proper...

1. Introdução A leitura de Ondjaki transporta-nos para um mundo pleno de deliciosas histórias (às vezes ela perguntava-me onde é que eu ia buscar tantas ideias, se eram de verdade ou inventadas, eu tinha de lhe explicar outra e outra vez que em Angola não era preciso inventar nada, ou a cidade te dava as estórias, ou a rua, ou a escola, ou então ha...

The Portuguese pronominal system includes the pronouns a gente ('we') and vocês ('you[plural]'), which resulted from the grammaticalization of (full) nominal phrases. In this paper, it is proposed that these pronouns are (generally, the former; dialectally, the later) morphologically underspecified (i.e. their person or person and number features h...

This article analyzes data extracted from the Syntax-oriented Corpus of Portuguese Dialects (CORDIAL-SIN) and Corpus Africa with the aim of demonstrating that the arbitrary/indefinite expressions uma pessoa and a pessoa convey first-person-based genericity, that is, what Moltmann (2010) calls ‘generalizing detached self-reference’. Differences in c...

This volume brings together studies that contribute to our knowledge about the role functional elements play in syntactic changes, and the semantic and functional features that are the driving force behind the changes. Parameter resettings, structural reanalyses, and changes in the feature specification of functional heads are explored related to t...

This volume contains a peer reviewed selection of invited contributions, papers and posters that were presented at the 2018 venue of Going Romance (XXXII) in Utrecht (a four day program that included two thematic workshops). The papers all discuss data and formalized analyses of one or more Romance languages or dialects, in either synchronic or dia...

This paper investigates expressions that convey 'objection' in the sense of Horn (1989), dealing with data from Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and Hungarian. It shows that such expressions, which include idioms/swear words, locative/temporal deictics, wh-words and lexical instantiations of 'nothing', behave as metalinguistic negation (MN) mar...

This article studies clitic placement in the Portuguese dialects of Azores and Madeira. Its empirical basis is the Syntax-oriented corpus of Portuguese dialects (CORDIAL-SIN). An initial descriptive overview shows that these dialects typically display the general European Portuguese pattern of clitic placement, but they also admit atypical instance...

The expansion of proclisis in contexts that typically exclude it in European Portuguese has been described as a syntactic feature that characterizes Angolan Portuguese. This article studies the presence of this feature in the literary language, based on a corpus of texts by Angolan and Mozambican authors, representing two generations: authors born...

This paper discusses the syntactic and interpretive properties of declarative sentences with immediately postverbal subjects in European Portuguese. The primary aim of this investigation is to examine whether the VSX constituent order corresponds to one or several syntactic structures with concomitant interpretive effects. The conclusion is that VS...

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental questions ranging from why negat...

In 2016, the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this. The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles, based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from mor...

Este volume de quase 1600 páginas é constituído por 60 estudos linguísticos e filológicos oferecidos a Ivo Castro por colegas de Portugal, Brasil, Espanha, Itália, Reino Unido, Suiça, Alemanha, Holanda e Polónia. Foram convidados a contribuir para esta homenagem todos os participantes, com comunicação, no IV Congresso Internacional de Linguística H...

This chapter introduces the reader to the concept of 'metalinguistic negation' as defined by Horn (1989), the extensive bibliography on the topic, and the main issues it considers and debates. Besides the pragmatic and semantic matters that have been at the heart of the literature's discussions, the chapter also considers syntactic aspects of metal...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that the verb-second property was a shared fea-ture of the Old Romance languages by investigating Old Portuguese. It demon-strates, on the basis of positive empirical evidence, that Old Portuguese allowed clausal configurations that could not have been derived by a verb-second system. It is shown that clitic place...

This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. Word order is at the core of natural language grammatical systems, linking syntax with prosody and with semantics and pragmatics. The chapters in this volume use the tools provided by the generative theory of grammar to examine the constrained ways in which...

This introductory overview chapter focuses on the relation between movement operations and word order by assembling the pieces of information offered by the book's authors. It shows how the essays published in the book indicate, when considered together, that word order change is mainly the effect of the interaction between clause structure and syn...

This paper traces the diachrony of three alternative configurations of infinitival complementation with causative and perception verbs in Portuguese, namely the faire-infinitive, the Exceptional Case Marking and the inflected infinitive constructions. It is shown that the faire-infinitive construction is the earlier pattern of infinitival complemen...

In this paper we discuss two types of co-occurrence restrictions involving reflexive clitics in European Portuguese and examine their implications for obligatory control. We argue that these restrictions may shed some light on where the “controller” is generated, thus making it possible to empirically test three minimalist approaches to control: th...

The impersonal verb custar (lit. 'cost') in European Portuguese selects for a dative experiencer argument and an infinitival clause, which may be preceded by the preposition a. Interestingly, a reflexive clitic co-referential with the experiencer argument can be deleted (under conditions to be specified) if it is within the prepositional infinitiva...

This chapter deals with two main topics: constituent order (focusing on the interaction between subject positions and interpretation), and null subjects. Both issues relate to case, agreement and expletives. The chapter discusses what motivates and licenses verb-subject orders in Romance non-wh sentences and identifies focalization, theticity and n...

Neste capítulo,descrevem-se as construções da gramática do português que correspondem a estratégias de marcação de foco, quer essas estratégias usem as diferentes possibilidades de alteração da ordem básica SVO/SVX, quer recorram às estruturas clivadas. O capítulo está dividido em duas grandes secções. Em 50.1, descreve-se a marcação de foco (infor...

Depois de uma breve apresentação da estrutura do Manual de Linguística Portuguesa, identificam-se neste capítulo as principais mudanças linguísticas que, ao longo do tempo, reconfiguraram a língua portuguesa, nos planos da fonologia, da morfologia, da sintaxe e da semântica lexical (ou outras vertentes da evolução do léxico). Em articulação com a p...

Neste capítulo descreve-se a colocação dos pronomes clíticos no português europeu contemporâneo, pondo em destaque as especificidades do português europeu no quadro das línguas românicas. Depois oferece-se uma perspetiva diacrónica que identifica os pontos de estabilidade e de mudança no sistema de colocação dos pronomes clíticos e mostra como, ao...

This chapter discusses some main properties of constructions involving participial passives, passive se, and impersonal se in Portuguese, focusing on its two main varieties, European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). It first deals with participial passives, distinguishing between adjectival and verbal passives and between the particip...

This work reexamines in the light of new data a proposal put forward in Martins (2011) concerning the historical development of clitic placement in Portuguese. Prima facie, this syntactic change follows a surprising path apparently involving a sudden reversal in the direction of change after the sixteenth century. It is argued in this paper that pr...

This work deals with the interpretive contrast that results from placing the indefinite quantifier algum in prenominal or postnominal position (e.g. alguma coisa ‘something' vs. coisa alguma ‘nothing') and seeks to explain the observed relationship between word order and polarity (i.e. the opposition positive/negative) in a formal, diachronic and c...

Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces captures the diversity of encounters that these languages have known and explores their relevance for current linguistic theories. The book focuses on dimensions along which Portuguese and Spanish can be fruitfully compared and highlights the theoretical value of exploring points of interaction between closely related...

This paper studies two types of indicative structures displaying subject-verb inversion which have received little attention in the literature on VS order in European Portuguese. Both types of structures involve coordination as a means to overtly express comparison/contrast, show a VSO pattern, and can be characterized as non-degree exclamatives. W...

This paper deals with denials. ‘Emphatic polarity’ is here approached from a well-defined perspective that focuses on the syntactic expression of reversing reactions to assertions.Three syntactic strategies to convey emphatic affirmation in the Romance languages are described and their distribution across languages elucidated, namely: the verb redu...

This paper explores the syntax of unambiguous metalinguistic negation (MN) markers in European Portuguese (EP) with the main goal of demonstrating the syntactic import of MN. Taking the EP facts as a means to gain insight into the grammatical encoding of MN in natural language, the paper shows that unambiguous MN markers split into two types: perip...

Este volume, en homenaxe ó profesor Ivo Castro (Universidade de Lisboa), contén arredor de trinta artigos de importantes investigadores das filoloxías galega e portuguesa. Os contributos céntranse en tres liñas: historia da lingua, gramática diacrónica e edición de textos, referidas tanto a galego como a portugués, cun límite temporal na fin do séc...

This talk explores the correlation between word order and polar interpretation displayed by DPs with algum/alguno ('some') in European Portuguese (EP) and Spanish. EP offers strong empirical evidence to support the analysis of the string [N+algum] as an NPI unit composed in the syntax. On comparative grounds, EP displays a higher level of grammatic...

This chapter discusses how the deictic locatives lá/cá ('there/here') developed into metalinguistic negation markers in European Portuguese, while preserving their regular working as locatives. It is shown that lá/cá entered the functional system as T-related emphatic markers, which later developed into C-related elements. The crucial property of E...

This paper proposes that object scrambling both in Old and Contemporary Portuguese is a strategy to create appropriate information focus configurations. Essentially, it makes the rightmost constituent that would otherwise bear the neutral sentence nuclear stress escape it. In narrow information focus structures this amounts to defocusing of the scr...

This chapter examines the change that contributes to the extension of inflected infinitives to the complement of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verbs from the sixteenth century on. The chapter is organized in six sections. Section 14.2 draws some diachronic parallels between ECM verbs and control/raising verbs. Section 14.3 shows that causative and...

This paper characterizes Contrastive Focus Fronting (CFF) in European Portuguese, distinguishing it from Topicalization and Evaluative exclamatives on the basis of syntactic and interpretational tests illustrated with empirical evidence from intuition/introspective judgments and different types of written sources. It reveals that the lack of consen...

This paper reexamines clitic placement in the history of Portuguese from the perspective of new data and the concept of 'grammar competition' (Kroch 1989, 2001). On the basis of a small corpus extracted from the plays of Gil Vicente, it is shown that in sixteenth century Portuguese, in addition to the 'proclitic' grammar that pervades written texts...

This book draws together nine original investigations by leading linguists and promising young scholars on the syntax of complementisers (eg that in She said that she would) and their phrases. The chapters are divided into two parts, each of which highlights aspects of the behaviour and function of complementisers. The first part looks at how and w...

In this chapter we will discuss how the two different values of clausal polarity, namely positive and negative, are grammatically encoded and describe the particular manifestations of polarity distinctions in European and Brazilian Portuguese. The chapter is organized in three main parts: (i) section 6.2, which is dedicated to the Portuguese answe...

This chapter discusses the emergence of hyper-raising constructions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Assuming Dresher's (1999) cue-based approach to language acquisition, it argues that the loss of Romance-type pro-drop in BP prompted a chain reaction that led to a reanalysis of finite Ts as optional Case-assigners/checkers (Ferreira 2000) and, theref...

This paper discusses perception and causative verbs in English and European Portuguese within Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree framework and provides an answer for the old riddle of why these verbs appear to select for different infinitival complements in their active and passive forms. Assuming that infinitival clauses are Case-bearing projections (Ra...

1. INTRODUÇÃO: FACTOS PRINCIPAIS E REFERÊNCIAS O presente artigo é uma versão da comunicação que apresentei no colóquio Na nosa lyngoage galega. A emerxencia do galego como lingua escrita na Idade Media no final de Novembro de 2005, em Santiago de Compostela. Embora se ocupe das manifestações iniciais do português escrito, e não do galego escrito,...

This paper discusses perception and causative verbs in English and European Portuguese within Chomsky's (2000, 2001) Agree framework and provides an answer for the old riddle of why these verbs appear to select for different infinitival complements in their active and passive forms. Assuming that infinitival clauses are Case-bearing projections (Ra...

The central issue discussed in this paper is the appearance of the inflected infinitive in the clausal complements of Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verbs in Portuguese. This change is related to other changes (which also characterize Control and Raising structures) that affected the infinitival complements of ECM verbs, namely, the emergence of pr...

This paper presents a comparative investigation contrasting Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese with respect to raising constructions. We provide an account of the attested fluctuation among raising, control, and impersonal constructions based on the Case- and θ-properties of the structures involved in each dialect. We also discuss the per...

This chapter accounts for variation and change with respect to clitic placement, VP-ellipsis, and scrambling in non-V1 finite clauses in Romance. The chapter is organized in five sections. Section 11.2 shows that in Romance there is a correlation which holds both synchronically and diachronically between the availability of VP-ellipsis and enclisis...

In this article a classical topic of the studies on historical syntax is analysed: the enclitical or proclitical collocation of atonic pronouns in Catalan. From a Romanic and comparative prespective, it is shown that the clitical pronouns in Old Catalan have a very similar behaviour to the atonic ones in other Romanic lenguages such as, for instanc...

This book explores a central aspect of language change: the nature and degree to which changes in morphology (inflectional word endings, for example) cause changes in syntax (for example, in word order). The twenty-two contributors consider such phenomena within the context of Chomsky's minimalist revision of his principles (of universal grammar) a...

Throughout this chapter, I will be mainly looking at diachronic and geographical variation in the domain of Romance negative polarity items (9.2 and 9.3). Variation with respect to affirmative polarity items, however, will also be examined (9.4). It will be shown that in Romance, negative words evolved from weak polarity items to strong polarity it...

In the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1993, 1994), movement is driven by morphological necessity, that is, movement is possible only for the purposes of morphological feature checking. In Kayne’s (1989) account of clitic climbing (CC), languages displaying this phenomenon are showed to have certain properties, induced by the nature of INFL, which ma...

In Romance, enclisis in tensed clauses correlates with the possibility of VP-deletion. To account for this fact, it is hypothesized that both phenomena emerge in languages where the functional category Sigma(Σ) — the locus for Affirmation/Negation — has strong V-features (Old Romance, Modern Portuguese and Modern Galician), whereas such phenomena a...