Divergências entre a construção passiva no português brasileiro e no inglês: evidências de corpus oral

Abstract

A transformational view of the passive construction does not account for all its possibilities. In this study, we propose a constructional view of the passive, in which it is considered an independent theoretical entity. Although the passive is syntactically identical in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English, this construction cannot be considered equivalent in both languages due to the presence of alternatives in BP to reach the semantic-pragmatic effects that are only reached in English through the passive. Considering the passive as a construction in the Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), we carried out an analysis of spoken corpora in both BP and English, in which we were able to attest a distributional difference of the passive between these two languages irrespective of its syntactic and functional congruity. We argue that the discrepancy observed in the construction frequency stems from the fact that passive retrieves different constructional representations in BP and English.