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Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics: 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
Edited by Roberta Pires De Oliveira, Ina Emmel and Sandra Quarezemin
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 260] 2020
► pp. 67–86

Chapter 2
Use-conditional expressions and nonlocal interpretation

A case study of a Brazilian Portuguese structure

| Universidade Federal de São Carlos

We investigate a Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) structure composed of an expressive item (EI), such as [essa droga de DP]; schematically [DP EI of DP]. The EI ‘droga’ in ‘Eu arrumei essa droga de carro’ (“I fixed this damn car”) does not usually have ‘carro’ (“car”) as its argument, but the whole sentence and expresses an attitude of the speaker towards the content of the proposition – s/he is not happy with the fact that s/he had to fix the car or that it broke. We claim that the EI in this structure can have scope only over the constituent in which it appears or over a CP or DP which occurs above it, based on Gutzmann’s (2015, 2019) theoretical framework.

Keywords: use-conditional meaning, non-local interpretation, use-conditional adjectives, semantics, pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The range and constraints of [DP EI de DP]: Morphosyntactic properties
  • 3.The EI in ‘essa droga de’: Semantic and pragmatic issues
  • 4.Pragmatics only?: Towards an understating of [DP EI de DP]
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.260.02bas
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