On low negation in Brazilian Portuguese progressive periphrases

• Grant number: 23/04610-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: June 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
• Grantee: Sonia Maria Lazzarini Cyrino
• Host Investigator: M. Teresa Espinal Farré
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain

Abstract

This project has the aim of investigating a new possibility for the use of negation in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP): the negative marker (hereafter 'low não') may appear in the slot between the auxiliary and the lexical (non-finite) verb in perfect and progressive periphrases. The relevance of this research lies in the fact that no other Romance language, as far as I know, has this kind of negation, and this fact is amenable to a novel analysis in the theory of the syntax-semantics of negation. Hence, the phenomenon under investigation requires research of not only the syntactic structure of this kind of negation but also its semantic effects. Differently from the phenomenon known in the literature as 'inhibited eventualities' - in which infinitive periphrases may be negated with a low negative marker and, consequently, the initiation of an event is inhibited in the presence of a non-dynamic verb -, non-finite forms in perfect and progressive periphrases in BP under 'low não' seem to be possible with both non- dynamic and dynamic verbs. Therefore, a more fine-grained analysis of their semantics and syntactic structure is in order. Since BP allows this kind of low negation in positions that are impossible in other languages, I aim to compare BP with Spanish and Catalan perfect and progressive periphrases and propose an analysis that account for their syntax-semantics differences. In sum, I aim to answer the questions: (i) can an analysis of different positions for negation be maintained for BP? (ii) what are the structures of perfect and progressive periphrases in BP as compared to Spanish and Catalan? (iii) do these constructions support Ramchand (2018)'s proposal for periphrases? (AU)