The caused-action construction in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) and its effects on the comprehension and production of BrP-English bilingual speakers
A central assumption of construction-based theories of grammar (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1988; Croft 2001; Michaelis 2012 among others), especially Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006), is that argument structure constructions, which are clausal patterns made of ordered sequences of syntact...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho
2019-12-01
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| Series: | Diacrítica |
| Online Access: | http://diacritica.ilch.uminho.pt/index.php/dia/article/view/410 |
| Summary: | A central assumption of construction-based theories of grammar (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1988; Croft 2001; Michaelis 2012 among others), especially Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006), is that argument structure constructions, which are clausal patterns made of ordered sequences of syntactic slots paired with semantic content, have meaning of their own. Thereby, argument structure constructions contribute meaning which is independent of the meaning of the individual lexical items that instantiate them. Based on that, in this paper we address BrP sentences with caused-action meaning like ‘eu cortei o cabelo’ (literally I cut the hair, meaning that I had my hair cut) and its effects on the BrP-English bilinguals’ production and comprehension in English. The objectives are: i) to describe the caused-action meaning associated to the transitive form in BrP; ii) to represent the caused-action construction in BrP, following the analysis started with Ciríaco (2014); and iii) to present part of the results of the study carried out by Santos (2019), showing experimental evidence from bilingualism. Finally, our paper shows that the caused-action meaning plays a role cross-linguistically, and that the caused-action construction is a type of construction, present in BrP and English as well. |
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| ISSN: | 0870-8967 2183-9174 |