VP idioms in Brazilian portuguese

• Grant number: 22/06216-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: January 02, 2023
• End date: January 01, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Jairo Morais Nunes
• Grantee: Claudia Souza Coelho
• Supervisor: Zeljko Boskovic
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Connecticut (UCONN), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/05241-0 - The behavior of modifiers inside idioms, BP.DR

Abstract

The literature on idioms points to the possibility of grouping them according to their degree of frozenness. After building a corpus of idiomatic VPs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), we applied the syntactic operations used by Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994) to differentiate two groups of idioms and we observed that BP idioms are more restrictive than their English counterparts. We also found some peculiarities in the behavior of these idioms, such as the ban on the presence of a passive agent and the requirement of same subjects in ellipsis constructions. Furthermore, possessives within these idiomatic VPs seem to replicate the patterns found by Nunes and Kato (2021) and Rodrigues (2020) in topic-subject/possessor raising constructions in BP. The goal of this project is to account for the patterns, restrictions, and peculiarities of BP idioms. (AU)