ABSTRACT
In this paper, we analyze an alternation which occurs with several verbs in Brazilian Portuguese. It allows to express the complex constituent, which originally occupies the direct object position, in two distinct syntactic positions such as in: o cachorro mordeu a perna da menina/ o cachorro mordeu a menina na perna ‘the dog bit the girl’s leg / the dog bit the girl on the leg’. We propose that this phenomenon arises from the verb argument factoring, which is determined by semantic nominal and verbal restrictions, and by pragmatic constraints.
Keywords:
verb alternation; argument factoring; semantic properties; pragmatic constraints