Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 34] 2023
► pp. 19–40
This chapter examines a frequentative periphrasis found in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), formed by the verb viver ‘to live’ and a verb in the gerund, and analyzes its aspectual and evaluative properties. Building on data from contemporary BP (Corpus NILC/São Carlos and Twitter), it is proposed that the evaluative meaning of the periphrasis (a negative evaluation of the high number of event repetitions) is associated with its aspectual meaning of a large and unspecified number of event iterations. This chapter reassesses a previous proposal regarding the theoretical status of the negative implication of pluractional forms (Amaral 2013b) and discusses its context-dependence. A pragmatic account is proposed regarding the evaluative meaning of plurals in the nominal and verbal domains across languages.