ABSTRACT
The objective of this study is to investigate transfer verbs of Brazilian Portuguese such as premiar (‘reward’) and patrocinar (‘sponsor’). Twenty-nine verbs were analyzed from a Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface approach. The analysis showed that they share some grammatically relevant properties. Semantically, they denote events of transfer, in which the transferred object/the theme is lexicalized in the root, entailing a means. Syntactically, they select two arguments and they accept the insertion of a PP (which specify the theme). Also, the means of the transfer can occur either in the subject position or as an adjunct. Based on these properties, the existence of a transfer verb class of locatum type was proposed, and an argument structure representation in terms of thematic roles and predicate decomposition was indicated. Interestingly, regarding their telicity, they seem to split into two different aspectual classes. However, it was shown that all verbs of this class are classified as accomplishments, as they lexically entail a change and denote events composed of two distinct subevents incrementally related.
Keywords:
verb class; transfer of locatum type; lexical aspect; telicity