Converse constructions in Brazilian Portuguese
preliminary description and classification
Abstract
Approaches to constructions with the support verbs dar (to give), ter (to have) and fazer (to make) in Brazilian Portuguese indicate that most of the predicative nouns combined with these verbs accept the transformation called Conversion. Conversion is a formal operation that establishes a non-oriented relation of syntactic and semantic (paraphrastic) equivalence between two elementary sentences, such as Ana dá um beijo em Rui/ Rui recebe um beijo de Ana (Rui gives Ana a kiss/ Ana gets a kiss from Rui). In this relation the predicative noun is maintained and the argument position is changed without affecting their semantic roles. In these constructions, the active sentence and the active support verb are considered standard; while the equivalent passive sentence is considered a converse construction. This work presents the first steps of a description of these constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. The study is based on Lexicon-Grammar binary matrices, in which the columns represent the syntactic-semantic properties of each construction. This study results may contribute to the analysis of texts, identifying the information and form of the structure, and consequently, improving the description of Brazilian Portuguese. Also, the representation of the results in binary matrices provides a formal description that can be used in applications in Natural Language Processing.
Copyright (c) 2019 Nathália Perussi Calcia, Oto Araujo Vale
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