Tópicos-sujeito locativos no português brasileiro: análise de hipóteses sintáticas e semântico-pragmáticas

Abstract

This paper analyzes subject topics in Brazilian Portuguese from a corpus-based study. Such elements exhibit verbal agreement despite occupying low positions in the thematic hierarchy. The work’s goal is to discuss some hypotheses published in the literature on its syntactic structure, as well as on its semantic and pragmatic interpretation. To do so, it analyzes data collected on a complaints website, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The conclusions reached are: (i) there are two grammars in Brazilian Portuguese, and the one with a conservative limits the occurrence of the phenomenon to imperfective predicates with non-culminative Aktionsart; (ii) the theme constituent always refers to [-animated] element; (iii) the locative constituent is consistently given in the discourse, being able either to promote a referent to the informational category of Topic or to keep it in that condition. These results confirm that the base position of subject topics is quite low in the structure, and that its final position consists in the canonical subject position (Spec, IP).