The Syntax of European Portuguese Resultatives

Abstract

This study attempts to propose a syntactic distinction between true resultatives and pseudo-resultatives and to provide an overview of the resultative constructions in European Portuguese (EP). It has been found that true resultatives, which have causative structures and involve Manner Conflation, are not allowed in EP, contrasting to languages such as English. That is because EP (or Romance languages in general) does not allow Manner Conflation. There are some resultative-like sentences in EP, but they should belong to the pseudo-resultative category, which contains an agentive structure and exhibits semantic and syntactic differences from true resultatives. In addition, simple resultatives, which have causative structures formed with light verbs (instead of Manner verbs) are also attested in EP because no Manner Conflation is involved.