ABOUT THE SUBCATEGORIZATION OF VERBS OF MOVEMENT (TO GO, TO COME and TO ARRIVE) IN PORTUGUESE: A PROPOSAL FOR A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MOZAMBIQUE PORTUGUESE WITH EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE

Abstract

The present work focuses on the use of verbs of movement (TO GO, TO COME and TO ARRIVE) in Portuguese. The main objective is to understand the subcategorization properties of verbs of motion performed in Mozambican Portuguese. This paper presents empirical data based on a corpus written and produced by university students in the initial courses at the Pedagogical University, Tete Delegation. The analyzed data show the following linguistic phenomena: (i) the subcategorization of verbs of movement (TO GO, TO COME and TO ARRIVE) obeys, on the one hand, patterns similar to EP; (ii) use of movement verbs (go, come and arrive) with a tendency to subcategorize the prepositional Sentences introduced by the proposition em; (iii) the preposition a seems to be less used in constructions that involve the movement verbs TO GO and TO ARRIVE in Portuguese; (iv) in the data related to the grammatical and/or acceptability judgments task, the accentuated acceptance of the preposition para is more evident in contexts in which movement verbs are involved, in particular the verb TO GO; (v) the absence or possible elimination of the definite article in some nouns, in contexts where the directional locative prepositions of EP (to/to and from) require a noun phrase complement. It is concluded, in the study, that these phenomena are due, on the one hand, to the fact that Mozambican Portuguese presents new subcategorization properties of these verbs by speakers. On the other hand, it is believed that there is a strong connection or even "a coexistence" between Portuguese and the Bantu languages and that, in a way, there seems to be some deviation from the EP rule.