Comportamento sintático dos argumentos internos de verbos bitransitivos no inglês e no português brasileiro

Abstract

This study raises questions about sentences whose verbs select two internal arguments both in English and in Brazilian Portuguese (PB). From a comparative study syntax, within the hypothetical-deductive method of approach, we analyze questions about the order of objects, considering that both in PB and in English the complements of the verb may appear in different orders such as (1a) They Gave a book to Mary / (1b) They gave a book and Mary and (2a) Eles deram flores a Maria / (2b) Eles deram Maria flores. The discussion for this type of sentence is made from the Generative Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1995). Whereas the comparison between structures of different languages can provide an adequate explanation of the principles and parameters that govern them, we make a characterization of ditransitive sentences in Portuguese and English, in order to establish whether these types of sentences represent structures of the same nature in both languages. We finish collecting arguments, based on the evidence described in this work, in order to defend that (2b) is a possibility for certain types of ditransitive sentences used in certain communities speakers of PB, specifically speakers of PB in the Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais and the Afro-descendant community of Helvetia-BA. We assume that (2b) presents syntactic behavior analogous to (1b) in English.