Locality in non-affixal deverbal nominalizations in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 24/04986-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2024
• End date: May 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Maria Clara Silva Araujo Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The study of nominalizations within the framework of Generative Grammar dates back to the publication of "Remarks on Nominalization" (Chomsky, 1970), which subsequently sparked various investigations on the behavior of this type of formation. However, the investigation of non-affixal deverbal nominalizations in Brazilian Portuguese is still a task to be completed. In particular, the theoretical model of Distributed Morphology (Halle; Marantz, 1993. Marantz, 1997), henceforth referred to as DM, appears to have much to contribute to the clarification of the behavior and formation processes of these nominalizations whose behavior seems, in turn, to be able to shed more light on the theoretical assumptions advocated by DM. The investigation proposed here aims to observe this phenomenon from the perspective of a non-lexicalist grammar architecture as the best alternative to explain this set of deverbals traditionally associated with "regressive derivation" by traditional grammarians. The review of these traditional concepts, as well as of works related to the formation and behavior of nominalizations and to categorization issues, will be developed in this research. In this sense, the central objective of this project is to relate non-affixal deverbal nominalizations to the core theoretical conditions of DM, namely cyclicality and locality, through the inspection of their syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. The analysis is based on a corpus elaborated from Lobato (1995; 1999) and relies on the idea of mixed functional categorization by a switch (cf. Panagiotidis, 2014).