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| Author(s): |
João Francisco Bergamini Perez
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 2023-06-13 |
| Examining board members: |
Aquiles Tescari Neto;
Adriana Martins;
Sandra Quarezemin;
Carlos Felipe Pinto
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| Advisor: | Aquiles Tescari Neto; Renato Miguel Basso |
| Abstract | |
The study of adverbial constituents continues to be an intriguing research topic in the study of syntax and semantics of natural languages. In particular, temporal adjuncts, the main object of our study, are among the topics that still deserve in-depth analyses that effectively seek to understand them not as classifying items of types of events—as is the case in the general literature—, but rather as elements which can modify the interpretations of the sentences in which they appear from specific temporal intervals made by each of them in certain sentence structures. In addition to these discussions, our contribution explores a detailed description of these adjuncts in Brazilian Portuguese (namely, ‘em x tempo’, ‘por x tempo’ and ‘durante x tempo’—respectively, ‘in x time’, ‘for x time’ and ‘during x time’ in English). The goal is to describe their structure so as to understand if the items that compose them (specifically, the first element from left to right (‘em’, ‘por’ and ‘durante’) in these phrases) are members of the same class. That will allow us also to see their contributions to the conveyed meanings. For this, we turn to the methodological and conceptual tools of the Cartographic Program, together with other studies devoted to the structural makeup of the functional hierarchy (f-seq) that would help us evaluate the hypotheses that we raised regarding the behavior of these temporal adjuncts. There are two possible zones in the f-seq where the items heading these adjuncts can enter the sentence structure. One such position is located in the higher portion of the rigidly hierarchical layers of adverbs—also known as the Middlefield (Cinque, 1999). The other position—below Cinque's hierarchy—corresponds to the hierarchical layer of circumstantial PPs—as proposed by Schweikert (2004) and Cinque (2006). In this sense, we verify the hypothesis that the external merge position of these temporal adjuncts will occur in these two zones, depending on the class of the item that c-commands the temporal measure phrase that composes the adjunct. Thus, for the preposition (‘em’/‘por’), the external merge will be in the TemporalP projection—i.e., in the Circumstantial PPs zone—and, by its turn, for the adverb (‘durante’), the external merge will take place in the AspDurativeP projection in the Middefield, with the associated measure phrase (‘x time’) merging into TemporalP. Based on a description of the different interpretations conveyed by the adjuncts ‘em x tempo’, ‘por x tempo’ and ‘durante x tempo’, as well as the adverbs and prepositions that head these temporal measure phrases in Brazilian Portuguese, this dissertation proposes a derivational model which can map, to the conceptual system (LF), the different interpretations associated with these three temporal adjuncts, starting from minimalist ((internal and external) Merge) and cartographic ingredients (the functional hierarchies proposed in Cartography works (cf. Rizzi, 1997; Cinque, 1999; Cinque and Rizzi, 2010; among others)). Therefore, the study will contribute to current theoretical debates within the scope of the Cartographic program, since we highlight the way in which the valuation of features occurs, in the derivational path, features that are directly related to the interpretation of the sentences in which each temporal adjunct appears. The work also contributes to grammatical theory as it proposes a new perspective for the analysis of temporal adjuncts, given that the interpretations resulting from their combination are fundamentally characterized by compositional steps arising from the valuation of certain features in derivational history (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 18/24960-7 - A proposal of syntactic-semantic analysis of temporal measurement adjuncts |
| Grantee: | João Francisco Bergamini-Perez |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |