Características morfossintáticas dos advérbios no português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis aims at describing and analyzing the morphosyntactic features of adverbs ending in mente (-ly) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). One of these features is the fact that adverbs have a close relationship with the adjectives in constructions such as (i) O João entrou na sala rápido / O João entrou na sala rapidamente John entered the room fast / O John entered the room quickly . Based on these examples, we assume that adverbs are a subclass of adjectives, having in mind that these categories occur in the same syntactic environment. Another factor for this assumption relates to their morphological constitution, since, in order to form adverbs in -mente, it is expedient to have an adjectival root. Then, I assume that the adjectives in sentences as in (i) may have a morphological default, i.e., without addition of -mente in their internal structure, or rather, they have to obtain a more specified form with mente in its internal structure. The theoretical framework adopted here is based on the work of Marantz (2001), whose analysis on the formation of morphological nominalizations is extended here to explain the adverbs in -mente in BP and Harris (1999).