Sobre as estruturas sintáticas dos nomes de entidade

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine Brazilian Portuguese (BP) Entity Nouns, focusing on its derivational history and argument structure. The methodology entails the adoption of the Distributed Morphology (DM) theoretical framework, from which two procedures are developed: (i) a concise examination of the existing literature on nominals that denote entities, and (ii) a qualitative-interpretive analysis of BP data to ascertain whether their behaviour aligns with the predictions set forth in the literature. The data set under examination encompasses derived nominals, which may be either morphologically simple (i.e., nominalizations of roots, such as in jogo ‘game’ and mesa ‘table’) or more complex (with the presence of additional functional layers, including overt categorizing morphemes, such as in pagamento ‘payment and notificação ‘notification/notice). These nouns are incorporated into contrived sentences (a procedure characteristic of Transformational Generative Grammar endeavors, with the objective of forcing the desired interpretation and verifying negative data). The results demonstrate that Entity Nouns can exhibit the same functional structures as Eventuality Nouns. Consequently, they can be deverbal and display an argument structure, including the explicit presence of arguments. This evidence substantiates the assertion that Entity Nouns do not exhibit radical morphosyntactic differences from Eventuality Nouns.
Keywords: Nominalization. Morphosyntax. Morphosemantics. Distributed Morphology,