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Verb and Context: The impact of shared knowledge on TAME categories
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 34] 2023
► pp. 19–40

Revisiting verbs and plurality

| Indiana University

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.

Keywords:
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysis of viver + gerund as an aspectual periphrasis
    • 2.1Aspectual properties – a pluractional meaning
  • 3.Evaluative meaning and context-dependence
    • 3.1Negatively evaluated predicates and/or contexts
    • 3.2Neutral predicates and negatively evaluated contexts
    • 3.3Positively evaluated contexts
  • 4.Evaluative meanings of plurals in the nominal domain
    • 4.1Evaluative or “affective” plurals across languages
    • 4.2Evaluative plurals in Portuguese: Derivational morphology (the case of -ada)
    • 4.3Plurals: An attempt to relate semantic properties and grammatical realization
  • 5.Evaluative meaning of plurals as “division of pragmatic labor”: A pragmatic account
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations in glosses are as follows
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 4 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.34.02ama
References

Corpora

The Corpus NILC/São Carlos is available at [URL]
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