O fato de o português brasileiro (PB) não ser uma língua pro-drop canônica é frequentemente associado ao enfraquecimento de seu sistema de concordância verbal. Entretanto, à parte a concordância associada ao pronome tu, PB padrão e português europeu padrão exibem o mesmo paradigma de concordância verbal. Neste artigo, argumento que essa discrepância encontra explicação nas especificações dos morfemas de concordância do PB. Mais especificamente, defendo que seus pronomes nominativos são maximamente subespecificados (NUNES, 2019) e isso se reflete nos traços-f que T pode portar (FERREIRA, 2000; NUNES, 2008) e em sua valoração via concordância. Assumindo que sujeitos nulos pronominais resultam de uma operação de elipse licenciada quando T tem seu traço-f mais proeminente valorado (MARTINS; NUNES, a sair), explica-se a gradação da aceitabilidade de sujeitos pronominais nulos em PB a depender do pronome elidido, bem como a correlação inversa entre possibilidade de sujeito nulo e possibilidade de hiperalçamento (NUNES, 2015).

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Assuming Chomsky's (2000; phase-based model, this paper deals with the issue of how the features that trigger successive cyclic A'-movement are lexically encoded and licensed. Modifying and expanding on work by Nunes (2014; 2016a), I argue that UG allows these "edge features" to be lexically hosted by phase heads (see Chomsky 2000) or moveable elements (see Bošković 2007) and that each choice has several intricate empirical consequences. In addition, I contend that like any other uninterpretable feature (see, e.g., Pesetsky & Torrego 2007), edge features may be intrinsically valued or unvalued and each of these choices may be associated with distinct types of allomorphy involving phase heads found across languages.

Brazilian Portuguese displays a cluster of apparently unrelated properties that set it aside within Romance. On the one hand, it has lost its third person possessive pronouns (cf. Oliveira e Silva 1985, Perini 1985, Cerqueira 1996, and Müller 1996), its third person accusative and dative clitics (cf. Omena 1978, Duarte 1986, Galves 1987, Kato 1993, Nunes 1993, Cyrino 1997, and Berlinck 2006), and its null subjects and null possessors have become severely restricted (cf. Duarte 1995, Figueiredo Silva 1996, Kato 1999, Ferreira 2000, Modesto 2000, Galves 2001, Floripi 2003, and Rodrigues 2004). On the other hand, it came to allow hyper-raising constructions (cf. Ferreira 2000 and Nunes 2020b), as well as the so-called ‘topic subject’ constructions, where a putative topic controls verbal agreement (cf. Pontes 1987, Galves 1987, Nunes 2017, and Kato and Ordóñez 2019). Moreover, it makes a pervasive use of preposition deletion in relative clauses (cf. Tarallo 1983) and its directional verbs came to select the preposition em ‘in’ instead of a ‘to’ (cf. Wiedemer 2013). In this paper, I argue that these and other seemingly independent changes can be accounted for if there is a general process of underspecification affecting phases in Brazilian Portuguese.