Um estudo sintático-semântico das preposições em complementos verbais de webjornais paulistas

The main goal of this work is to evaluate the realization of the linguistic phenomenon of preposition and also to investigate how current normative pressures influence the production and the perception of processes of variation and change in Brazilian Portuguese. We analyze the use of prepositions a and para in verbal complementation contexts in contemporary journalistic texts from São Paulo’s press – the web newspapers. The contexts considered are constructions with complements of direction, movement with transference, material transference, and verbal/perceptual predicators (Berlinck, 1996; Corrêa, Cançado, 2006). Because written texts tend to be more conservative (i.e. more normative) this research provides an important linguistic investigation that contributes to the sociolinguistic knowledge of the language. However, the newspapers also tend to reflect the use, so they constitute a privileged place for us to understand the conflicting relationship between ‘norm’ and ‘use’. Besides this, the research is relevant for General Linguistics for considering linguistic and extralinguistic factors which determine the use and frequency of the prepositions, like syntactic-semantic relations between the preposition, the verb, the complement, and the text genre. We collected data from web newspapers from Araraquara, with small and medium circulation. Based on previous results, we have ascertained the predominance of the use of the preposition a in the newspapers from São Paulo in the 20th century. However, we have also ascertained representative records of variation... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

Percurso diacrônico de completivas introduzidas por 'como' no português

As a more extensive issue, this paper deals with the polysemy attested in all Romance languages between interrogative pronouns and subordination markers in complex sentences. It investigates, specifically, the behavior of objective complement clauses introduced by “como” (“how”) in constructions in which they occur as equivalent to the meaning of prototypical declarative complement clause introduced by the conjunction “que” (“that”). It analyzes complement clauses introduced by “como” and “que” occurring in representative Portuguese texts from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. The results of the comparative analysis between the two forms of clausal complement show that in archaic Portuguese “como” was used primarily to introduce complement clauses of factive verbs. When the complement clause is introduced by “como”, the content that is presupposed as true due to the meaning of matrix verb has reinforced this factuality. In the passage from the archaic to the modern period, there was a drastic decrease in the frequency of occurrences of complement clauses with “como”, which are replaced by the form of completive introduced by the conjunction “que” in the context of factual constructions. In contemporary Portuguese, this replacement is fully established. Complement clauses with “como” remain rare and limited to specific contexts in which “como” maintains its reinforcement function of factual meaning.

O caso comitativo

Comitative is a semantic case not much studied. Traditional grammar includes it sometimes as Indirect Object, sometimes as Adverbial Adjunct of Company. In this paper, we show that it is a nuclear element, therefore it is a Complement not an Adjunct; in other words, being a deep semantic case, it constitutes an Argument selected by the verb in the sentence organization.