Uma abordagem sintática da estrutura interna dos particípios do português brasileiro: passivas e tempos compostos

Abstract

This work investigates the internal structure of the participle forms in passive sentences and auxiliary constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. In general terms, participles have been pointed out in the literature as an interesting phenomenon for linguistic analysis, especially because they are not characterized as a homogeneous class, being used in syntactic structures of different natures. Thus, the outline proposed in this work is justified by the fact that the participle in passive and auxiliary constructions does not superficialize on its own, being necessarily accompanied by an element of a verbal nature that precedes it. This research is developed under a syntactic view of word formation, the Distributed Morphology framework (HALLE; MARANTZ, 1993; MARANTZ, 1997), henceforth MD, which, by undoing the boundaries between the formation of words and sentences, licenses interactions between the internal structure of the participle and the sequence of functional heads that participate in the structure. Thus, the starting point of our proposal is the hypothesis that the participle is formed from the concatenation of functional heads of verbal and nominal nature that are organized within the same syntactic structure. We propose, then, that the heterogeneous categorical behavior of the participle is the result of the interaction between functional projections composed of verbal and nominal features hierarchically organized by the syntax. More specifically, we propose that the -d- morpheme of regular participles is the exponent Participle (Part) head in the syntactic structure, which hosts, at the same time, verbal and nominal features, similarly to the proposal of a Switch head (PANAGIOTIDIS and GROHMANN, 2009; PANAGIOTIDIS, 2015). More specifically, containing mixed categorical features, this projection selects a verbal complement, while allowing the entry of nominal heads in the structure, such as gender and number, for example. In this way, we propose that the Part head is also responsible for interrupting the extended projection of the verb. In implementing the analysis, we propose that, in verbal passives, the entry of this Part head occurs above Pass (BRUENING, 2014), which passivizes the structure, and this, in turn, selects a non-canonical Voice, which triggers agentive reading, but does not license the entry of an external argument into the structure. In adjectival passives, in general, we propose the entry of a PassAdj head, along the lines of Bruening (2014), above Part, which, unlike Pass, stativizes the structure. In resultative passives, the result reading is effectively triggered from the licensing of the internal argument, which is inserted in the structure via v. In stative passives, this argument is licensed in the specifier of the PassAdj itself, so that the denoted reading is that of a pure state. Finally, in auxiliary constructions, the attachment of Part occurs above a canonical Voice (KRATZER, 1996), interrupting the sequence of verbal layers only after the insertion of the external argument. Furthermore, the interruption of the extended verbal projection by a mixed head as Part requires the presence of a new verbal layer, which will be responsible for licensing the T head that hosts the tense features of the sentence. This explains the need for a verbal element to be inserted into these structures for the effective continuation of syntactic derivation.