Ditransitives Sentences in Brazilian Portuguese revisited under the light of the Structural Cartography of IP

• Grant number: 07/07995-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2008
• End date: December 31, 2008
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Paula Roberta Gabbai Armelin
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In this work I will investigate the ditransitive sentences in Brazilian Portuguese (PB). In particular, I will discuss the informational aspects of pairs of sentences like, Paul gave a book to John/ Paul gave John a book and the corresponding pair O Paulo deu um livro o João (The Paul gave a book ÿ the John)/O Paulo deu o João um livro (The Paul gave ÿ the Jonh a book), already attested in a PB dialect spoken at the "Zona da Mata Mineira", from now on PBM, investigated in Scher (1996).First, I will try to propose a syntactic structure for the PB and the PBM ditransitive sentences, using the Generative Theory and, more specifically, the IP Structural Cartography presented in Belletti (2002). On a second moment, it is also going to be necessary to explain the absence of the preposition in the Indirect Object in the PBM ditransitive sentences, and for such, I will take, as a theoretical basis, one of the recent developments of the Generative Grammar, known as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993, Marantz, 1997). Therefore I will try to verify which kind of morphologic operation is happening that allows the preposition not to be inserted at the time of the vocabulary insertion.Therefore, this investigation intends to: (i) contribute to the studies on the syntactic structure of the ditransitive sentences; and (ii) possibly, as a follow up of the analysis provided for the omission of the preposition in the IO in PBM, to offer a new analysis for the cases of "topics without head", already described in the literature of the syntax, in which the preposition is omitted, just like in the case PBM of ditransitive sentences in.