Syntax-Semantics interface: making the case for a construction grammar approach to Brazilian Portuguese VS order
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2015.2.20403Keywords:
VS order, Construction Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Semantic frame.Abstract
This papers aims at developing a construction grammar approach to subject inversion in Brazilian Portuguese. After arguing that the verb-subject structure is best understood as a grammatical construction (thus a symbolic unit), we go on to analyze the semantic dimension of the VS construction in two separate levels: Verhagen’s (2005) object-level (the construction’s predication) and subject-level (the construal imposed on the predication). It is also argued that the correlations often found between subject inversion, on the one hand, and unnacusativity or lack of agentivity, on the other, can be regarded as by-products of the general proposal advanced here.
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