Verb raising and the architecture of the clause in Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese: a cartographic approach

• Grant number: 16/20853-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: April 01, 2017 - September 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Aquiles Tescari Neto
• Grantee: Aquiles Tescari Neto
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Tradition in Generative Grammar assumes that adverbs occupy fixed positions in the sentence. The thematic verb and other constituents raise to different positions across them (Pollock 1989). Hence, adverbs are generally considered diagnostics for verb raising. The goal of this research, which assumes the Cartographic Program, is to study the movement of different verb forms in two varieties of Portuguese, namely Mozambican Portuguese (MP) and Angolan Portuguese (AP), by turning to the position of adverbial phrases (AdvPs) relative to the verb as diagnostics. By taking the "Middlefield"/IP to be a functional space consisting of almost 30 projections (Cinque 1999), we seek to understand where the thematic verb goes. The choice of these two Lusophone varieties is mainly due to two reasons: (1) they are still not very well described with respect to clausal structure and verb movement; (2) the study of verb raising to INFL, in a comparative perspective, may allow a deeper understanding of the driving force for this movement. A preliminary investigation of the validity of Cinque's hierarchy in the two varieties will be made based on tests involving two AdvPs of different semantic classes each time in the two possible orders. In a second moment, we intend to test the position of different forms of the verb (namely, the finite verb, the infinitive, the participle and the gerund) with respect to each adverb of Cinque's hierarchy. We hope it helps us to (i) understand what motivates verb movement in AP and MP, and (ii) specify the differences with respect to the different heights to which the verb raises in these varieties. We also want to understand how the patterns observed in the movement of the thematic verb in each of these two varieties are related to other syntactic phenomena in these languages. (AU)