Cover not available
Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 135–152

Chapter 8
Morphological doublets in Brazilian Portuguese wh-constructions

 | State University of Campinas
This chapter contains an overview of diachronic and synchronic studies on Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions, and discusses the intriguing problem of apparent syntactic doublets, or optionality, in this domain. However, a careful examination of the diachronic order in which these patterns appear, and the variation exhibited in contemporary written and spoken corpora lead us to conclude that the co-occurring patterns do not constitute syntactic “doublets.”
Keywords: wh-questions, Brazilian Portuguese, doublets, optionality, diachrony, wh-movement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The diachronic development of wh-constructions in BP
    • 2.1The V2 period
    • 2.2The inverse [é que] cleft construction of modern Portuguese
    • 2.3The wh-in-situ construction
    • 2.4The semi-cleft wh-construction
    • 2.5The appearance of the pattern wh-SV
    • 2.6A missing cell between the wh-in-situ and the wh-que SV
  • 3.Syntactic analyses
    • 3.1Thetic and categorical sentences
    • 3.2The oldest type of wh-questions in Portuguese: The V2 construction
    • 3.3The inverse-cleft questions (WH-é que SV) as a grammaticalized V2 construction
    • 3.4From wh-movement to a fake “wh-in-situ”
    • 3.5From inverse-wh-clefts to canonic wh-clefts
    • 3.6The 20th century innovative reduced cleft Wh-que
    • 3.7The appearance of WH-SV, the most recent pattern
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.08kat
References (38)
References
Ambar, Maria Manuela. 1988. “Para uma sintaxe da Inversão Sujeito verbo em Português.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lisbon.Google Scholar
. 2003. “ Wh-Asymmetries”. In UG and External Systems: Language, brain and computation, ed. by Ana Maria Di Sciullo, 209–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Barbosa, Pilar. 2001. “On Inversion in Wh-questions.” In Romance Inversion, ed. by. Aafke Hulk, and Jacques-Yves Pollock, 2–59. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 2004. Aspects of the low IP area.” In The Structure of IP and CP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, ed. by Luigi Rizzi, 16–51. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Britto, Helena. 2000. “Syntactic codification of categorical and thetic judgments in Brazilian Portuguese.” In Brazilian Portuguese and the Null Subject Parameter, ed. by Mary A. Kato, and Esmeralda V. Negrão. 195–222. Frankfurt: Vervuert/Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai-shen, and Johan Rooryck. 2000. “Licensing wh-in-situ.” Syntax 3: 1–19.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam, and Howard Lasnik. 1977. “Filters and Control.” Linguistic Inquiry 8: 425–504.Google Scholar
Duarte, Maria Eugenia Lamoglia. 1992. “A perda da ordem V(erbo) S(ujeito) no português do Brasil.” DELTA 8: 37–52.Google Scholar
Duarte, Maria Eugenia, and Mary A. Kato. 2002. “A Diachronic Analysis of Brazilian Portuguese Wh-Questions.” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies VI: 326–339.Google Scholar
Hornstein, Norbert, Jairo Nunes, and Kleanthes Grohman. 2005. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, C. -T. James. 1982. “Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar.” Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A. 1987. “Inversão da ordem SV em interrogativas no português.” DELTA 3 (2): 243–252.Google Scholar
1993. “The distribution of null and pronominal objects in Brazilian Portuguese.” In Linguistic Perspectives on the Romance Languages: Selected Papers from the XXI Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, ed. by William J. Ashby, Marianne Mithun, and Giorgio Perissinotto, 225–235, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999. “Strong pronouns and weak pronominals in the null subject parameter.” Probus 11 (1): 1–37.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000. “The partial pro-drop nature and the restricted VS order in Brazilian Portuguese.” In Brazilian Portuguese and the Null Subject Parameter, ed. by Mary A. Kato, and Esmeralda V. Negrão. 223–258. Frankfurt: Vervuert/Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
2007. “Free and dependent small clauses in Brazilian Portuguese.” DELTA 23: 85–111.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013a. “Deriving wh-in-situ through movement.” In Information Stucture and Agreement, ed. by Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González, and Mariano Reyes-Tejedor, 175–191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013b. “ WH-movement in the history of Brazilian Portuguese.” STIL 5: 59–76. [URL]
2014. “Focus and WH-questions in Brazilian Portuguese.” In Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory, ed. by Nathalie Dion, André Lapierre, and Rena Torres Cacoullos, 111–130. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A., and Carlos Mioto. 2005. “A multi-evidence study of European and Brazilian wh-questions.” In Linguistic evidence: empirical, theoretical and computational perspectives, ed. by Stephan Kepser, and Marga Reis, 307–328. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kato, Mary A., and Eduardo Raposo. 1996. “European and Brazilian word order: questions, focus and topic constructions.” In Aspects of Romance Linguistics, ed. by Claudia Parodi, Carlos Quicoli, Mario Saltarelli, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 267–277. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Kato, Mary A., and Ilza Ribeiro. 2009. “Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Brazilian Portuguese.” In Focus and Background in Romance Languages, ed. by Aandreas Dufter, and Daniel Jacob, 123–154. Amsterdam: John. Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kato, Mary A., and Fernando Tarallo. 2003. “The loss of VS syntax in Brazilian Portuguese.” In Dialogue between Schools: Sociolinguistics, conversational analysis and generative theory in Brazil, ed. by Brigitt Schliebe-Lange, Ingedore Koch, and Konstanze Jungbluth, 101–129. Münster: Nodus Publicationen, Klaus D. Ditz.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard. 1994. The Antysymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
. 2001. Pronouns and their antecedents. In S. Epstein and D. Seely (orgs) Derivation and explanations in in the Minimalist program. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 133–166.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard, and Jacques-Yves Pollock. 1978. “Stylistic Inversion, Successive Cyclicity and Move NP in French.” Linguistic Inquiry 9: 595–621.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. 1994. “Morphosyntactic variation.” In Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession on Variation and Linguistic Theory, ed. by Katherine Beals, 180–201. Chicago: CLS.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S-Yuki. 1972. “The categorical and the thetic judgment: Evidence from Japanese Syntax.” Foundations of Language 9: 153–185.Google Scholar
Lopes-Rossi, Maria Aparecida. 1996. “A Sintaxe Diacrônica das Interrogativas-Q do Português.” Ph.D. dissertation, UNICAMP.Google Scholar
Martins, Ana Maria. 1994. “Clíticos na História do Português.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lisbon.Google Scholar
Mioto, Carlos, and M. Cristina Figueiredo Silva. 1995. “Wh que = Wh é que? ” DELTA 11 (2): 301–311.Google Scholar
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2001. “EPP, Scrambling, and wh-in situ .” In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 293–338. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Noonan, Maire. 1989. “Operator licensing and the case of French interrogatives.” In Proceedings of the 8th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. by Jane Fee, and Kathryn Hunt, 315–330. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Ordoñez, Francisco, and Anton Olarrea. 2006. “Microvariation in Caribbean/non-Caribbean Spanish.” Probus 18 (3): 59–97.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. “The fine structure of the left periphery.” In Elements of Grammar, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uriagereka, Juan. 1995. “An F position in Western Romance.” In Discourse Configurational Languages, ed. by Katalin É. Kiss, 153–175. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vergnaud, Jean-Roger, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta. 2005. “The representation of focus and its implications: Towards an alternative account of some ‘intervention effects’.” In Organizing Grammar- Linguistic Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, ed. by Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Reny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz, and Jan Koster, 641–60. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Kato, Mary Aizawa
2020. Chapter 5. Wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French. In Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 260], ► pp. 136 ff. DOI logo
Kato, Mary A.
2019. Echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 35:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.