CONSTRUÇÕES COM OS VERBOS LEVES DAR E FAZER: CLASSE ÚNICA? UMA ANÁLISE SINTÁTICO-SEMÂNTICA À LUZ DA MORFOLOGIA DISTRIBUÍDA

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the light verb constructions (LVCs) in (un)defined and (non-)referential names in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In particular, the LVCs formed by the verbs dar (to give) and fazer (to do) with the nominalizations -ada, -ção, and -mento are observed. Data are constituted by a written corpus and were collected from BP digital sites. I assume that the formation of LVCs does not fail in BP, both with bare nouns and with nominals headed by phonetically realized definite and indefinite determiners. Nevertheless, I defend the hypothesis that this behavior, the semantic (non-)contribution of the verbal element, and the reading of an (in)determined event imply a division of this class. The analysis of the corpus data showed that the verb dar has no semantic content of material possession transfer as its heavy version. Besides, the verb fazer presents the same notion of ‘build’ as the heavy verbs, differing in terms of the ‘built’ element, which is not an entity, but something vague, an event. This behavior showed that the verbs ‘dar’ and ‘fazer’ are not equivalent in terms of the properties of light verbs. Thus, following the Kearns (2002) model for English, the phrases with the verb ‘dar’ would be LVC with a true light verb (TLVC), and the phrases with the verb ‘fazer’ would be LVC with a vague action verbs (VAVC). TLVCs are subject to a subdivision that is not related to the verb, but to the nominal element because the verb ‘dar’ is associated with an undefined and non-referential name. Its reading was related to an undetermined event once It is not clearly established in terms of time, completeness, or caution with It was performed. In other phrases with ‘dar’, the name is defined and/or referential, and its reading is related to a determined event. Thus, it was suggested to treat the former with TLVC-Indet and the latter with TLVC-Det. Based on Distributed Morphology (HALLE; MARANTZ, 1993, 1994; MARANTZ, 1997; HALLE, 1997; HARLEY, 2014 etc.), I assume that 1) The verb ‘dar’ is a single underspecified vocabulary item, and may occur in different syntactic contexts; 2) The verb ‘fazer’ is a single item of a specific vocabulary, which occurs in different contexts and its syntactic structure seems to license the interpretation; 3) The light verb 'dar' is semantically empty and the light verb 'fazer' is not, so that the first is generated in the head of vP and the second in the head of VP; 4) the reading of the indeterminate event, observed in sentences with ‘dar’ and with nominalizations in –ada, -ção and –mento, is the result of the features [-definite] and [-specific] of the eventive DP.