Verbal classes and alternations in brazilian portuguese: a semantic analysis of meteorological verbs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17058/signo.v50i99.20419Keywords:
meteorological verbs, lexical semantics, thematic roles, lexical aspectAbstract
“Weather verbs” (“to rain”, “to dawn”, and others) exhibit different semantic and syntactic behaviors (Costa et al., 2012), and have been analyzed in the literature as both unergative and unaccusative. Moreover, they have been described as a uniform class (Ruwet, 1991) and as a heterogeneous set of verbs (Roldán, 2013). This study analyzes these verbs in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), proposing that they lexicalize meteorological events in two distinct ways, which are reflected in their syntactic structure, following Levin and Krejci’s (2019) analysis for English. The 17 verbs examined were collected from Borba (1990), and the usage examples were extracted from the Corpus do português (Davies, 2016). The research is grounded in the hypothesis of semantic determination over syntax and in the syntax-lexical semantics interface (Levin, 1993). The results show that these verbs fall into two semantic classes, corresponding to unaccusative and unergative structures. Verbs like “to rain” pattern with unergatives, while verbs such as “to dawn” behave as unaccusatives, presenting a derived subject. Thus, meteorological phenomena are lexicalized in two distinct ways in BP, affecting syntactic realization (Levin; Krejci, 2019). Verbs like “to dawn” behave as achievements and are unaccusative. In contrast, verbs like “to rain” operate as activity verbs, lacking predication, and are therefore unergative.
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