Clara Vanderschueren

The Portuguese Inflected Infinitive: an empirical approach

Abstract This paper deals with the seemingly free competition between inflected and uninflected infinitives in Portuguese, a much-debated issue in Portuguese linguistics, which, however, has not been seriously empirically studied before. We specifically focus on Vesterinens (2006, 2011) cognitive hypothesis according to which the inflected infinitive is used in cases in which the infinitival subject risks to be less cognitively accessible due to contextual reasons. We investigate this theory by analyzing both corpus and experimental (self-paced reading) data, making use of advanced linear modeling. We show that both types of analysis lead to complementary results: the inflected form primarily eases the processing of sentences with increased complexity. On the basis of these results, we argue that Vesterinens accessibility account is but part of the solution for the inflected/non-inflected problem.

Infinitivo y sujeto en portugués y español: un estudio empírico de los infinitivos adverbiales con sujeto explícito

Infinitive and subject in Portuguese and Spanish. An empirical study on adverbial infinitives with explicit subjects. The main goal of my dissertation is to empirically investigate Portuguese and Spanish infinitival constructions with specified subjects in adverbial contexts, on the basis of statistical analyses of both corpus and experimental data. Within a functional-cognitive paradigm, the first three chapters offer a state of the art on three theoretical issues that are relevant for these constructions: 1) the flexible nature of the infinitive, presenting both verbal and nominal behaviour, 2) the subject as a multifaceted concept, being prototypically the intersection of Agent and Topic, 3) adverbial clauses as a heterogeneous group of constructions showing more or less syntactic-semantic autonomy with respect to the main clause. The three theoretical chapters are followed by two extensive empirical chapters which form the main body of this dissertation: after giving an overview of the literature on the construction under study, these chapters offer a sound and innovating empirical analysis. The first study focuses on the use of the Portuguese inflected infinitive in adverbial contexts in which the uninflected infinitive is equally well-formed (i.e. in cases of co-reference between the main subject and the infinitival subject), as in: Vamos a escola para aprender / aprendermos coisas novas. We-go to school in-order-to learn.INF / learn.INF.3PL things new ‘We go to school in order to learn new things.’ Results from a multivariate corpus analysis are compared with results from a self-paced reading experiment. It turns out that the use of the inflected infinitive in these contexts can be accounted for 1) by reduced mental accessibility of the infinitival subject, 2) by the syntactic-semantic autonomy of the clause and 3) by the explicitly verbal nature of the infinitive: when subject accessibility is reduced, when the infinitival clause has a more autonomous status and when the infinitive shows explicitly verbal marking, the use of the inflected form is favoured over the uninflected infinitive. The second case study offers an extensive comparative corpus study on Spanish and Portuguese infinitives with proper subjects, as in the following examples respectively: Al entrar Juan, todos se levantaron. (Sp) At-the enter-INF John, all REFL they-stood-up ‘When John entered, everyone stood up’ Escrevi uma carta para eles ca estarem a tempo. (Ptg) Write-I a letter for they here be-INF.3PL on time ‘I wrote a letter so that they would be here on time’ Both constructions differ from the start in that the subject in Spanish tends to be placed after the infinitive, while in Portuguese they are usually placed before the infinitive. In addition, the Portuguese infinitive is obligatorily inflected. In accordance with this, the corpus analysis shows that, these constructions turn out to be more clause-like in Portuguese as compared to Spanish: the Portuguese constructions present more prototypical subjects (e.g. more topical and more agentive) and infinitives closer to the verbal prototype (e.g. more dynamic, and with more explicitly verbal characteristics as the use in verbal periphrases), while Spanish infinitives with proper subjects are more nominal in nature. Moreover, the Portuguese constructions tend to be more complex than their Spanish counterparts (e.g. in terms of numbers of words). Therefore, these Portuguese infinitival constructions turn out to be more serious competitors with finite adverbial clauses than the Spanish ones. On a more general level, this dissertation gives insight in the flexible (i.e. more verb-like or more noun-like) behaviour of the infinitive in different languages: even in two closely related languages as Spanish and Portuguese, the infinitive has different preferences as to a more verbal or more nominal behaviour.

De verbos de colocación a pseudo-copulativos: procesos de gramaticalización en los cuasi-sinónimos poner/meter y pôr/meter en español y en portugués

Most studies on locative verbs focus on (a) the internal organization of this verbal category and its position within various verb classifications, (b) the syntactic analysis of their arguments, and more particularly the status of the locative complement. The aim of the present paper is to compare the syntax and semantics of the frequently used locative verbs poner and meteresp in Spanish with their Portuguese cognate counterparts por and meterptg. We examine to what extent the use of these near-synonyms goes beyond the basic locative meaning and extends towards other, more grammaticalized, domains. More particularly, on the basis of translation corpus data and comparable corpus data, we empirically analyze the semantic features of their transfer use, their causative/inchoative uses and their (pseudo)-copulative uses, and we shed light on their frequencies. It will be shown that the Spanish verbs present a higher degree of grammaticalization compared to their Portuguese counterparts, and that intralinguistically, poner and por are far more grammaticalized than their near-synonyms meteresp/meterptg.

¿Ao cair da noite o al caer el día? Análisis contrastivo de las construcciones infinitivas con al/ao en español y portugués

Las clausulas adverbiales infinitivas introducidas por al/ao en castellano y portugues se comportan de manera bastante diferente en ambos idiomas. Este articulo estudia empiricamente la aparicion del sujeto propio del infinitivo, que puede ser genitivo o nominativo. Resulta que en espanol el sujeto nominativo aparece cuando la construccion tiene un estatuto clausal bajo, o sea, cuando la construccion es semanticamente poco dinamica y el sujeto es un sujeto semantica y pragmaticamente poco tipico. En portugues, al reves, el sujeto nominativo aparece cuando el estatuto clausal es alto. En situaciones inversas, el portugues optara por un sujeto genitivo o por otro tipo de construccion.

The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: A behavioral profile analysis

Abstract This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e., which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception.