A sintaxe das small clauses livres do português brasileiro.

Abstract

This thesis investigates an exclamative construction very used by the native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, but under-researched, namely, the Free Small Clauses (FSCs), juxtaposition of a predicate and its subject, in that order, without any verb or morphological specification for tense on the surface, as in the following construction Bonita a sua roupa Your Clothes are beautiful , for example. The main goal of this study is to answer the following question: what is the internal structure of the FSCs of Brazilian Portuguese? In order to answer this question, at first, this work establishes what are the syntactic-semantic restrictions which govern the constitutive elements of this kind of constructions, describing the contexts in which the predicate and the subject can act. For the analysis of FSCs, we took as the theoretical assumptions the generative enterprise in its minimalist model (cf. CHOMSKY, 2000 et passim), as well as the notion of predication and phase extension as delimited in Den Dikken (2006, 2007). To answer the question put before, i.e., what is the internal structure of FSCs, we did several tests to understand what would be the internal composition of this type of structure and what is the structural position of its elements. What we could conclude in the end of this work is that the FSCs are root TPs, that is, one TP phase. Differently of Chomsky (2000), who admits that only CP and v*P can be strong phases, this thesis bring some evidences from Brazilian Portuguese in favor of the idea that TP would also be a phase.