Modificação adjetival na raiz: um estudo sobre a interação sintático-semântica entre raízes e adjetivos

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of root-level adjectival modification in Brazilian Portuguese sentences, such as Ela urinou preto (‘She peed and the color was black’) and Ela falou alto (‘She spoke and the volume was high’). It is argued that, in these cases, the adjective adjoins directly to the root before its verbal categorization. The research is grounded in Distributed Morphology (DM), which rejects a traditional lexicon and proposes that syntax is the grammatical component responsible for word formation. In DM, roots are basic elements of syntactic derivation, composed of an abstract bundle of features and lacking a defined grammatical category. Thus, a root only belongs to a grammatical class (e.g., V, N) after being categorized by a functional head in the syntax. The central hypothesis of this research is that the scope of the adjective in the analyzed sentences reveals that the modification does not occur at the verbal event level (VP). While adjectives like rápido (‘fast’) in Ela correu rápido (‘She ran fast’) modify the event itself (characterizing its duration), adjectives such as preto (‘black’) and alto (‘high’) cannot be interpreted as properties of the event (events are neither colored nor loud). Instead, these adjectives modify internal properties that, according to this proposal, are specific to the verb root, suggesting an adjunction at an initial stage of the derivation (even before VP formation). This analysis is inspired by Levinson’s (2010) hypothesis, which proposes the so-called pseudoresultative modification in similar English data. According to the author, certain adjectives modify the root directly due to their entity-oriented semantics. However, this dissertation adapts this idea, proposing that the adjunction of the adjective occurs through underspecified semantic features in the root, without the need to posit the creation of an implicit entity. The semantic nature of roots is addressed by contrasting different theoretical positions. Aligning with Marantz’s (1996) perspective, it is argued that roots possess an underspecified semantic content, which is crucial for licensing adjunction in the syntactic component. This stance contrasts with approaches like De Belder et al. (2015), who consider roots to be semantically empty. The investigation of the adjective class is primarily based on the semantic approach presented in Borges Neto (1979), whose approach to extensionality helps organize and interpret the semantic relationship between adjectives and roots. To define the hierarchical distribution of adjectives that participate in root modification, the dissertation adopts the hierarchy proposed by Scott (2002), showing that only adjectives in lower hierarchical positions have access to the root. The results indicate that root-level adjectival modification is guided by semantic features that are syntactically relevant in the derivation. This contributes to the understanding of the interaction between roots and adjectives, offering new perspectives on the conditions that enable this interaction.