Conférence LLF (UMR 7110)

[Denis Paillard]

*Conférence du Laboratoire de Lingusitique formelle (UMR 7110)
Lundi 22 janvier 2007 à 16 h 30.
Salle 124


*Conférence de * Heloisa Maria Moreira Lima-Salles University** of 
Brasília/Visiting scholar at the LUCL, University of Leiden*





Subordination in the diachrony of Brazilian Portuguese:

finiteness as a grammatical property under parametric variation

Heloisa Maria Moreira Lima-Salles

University of Brasília/Visiting scholar at the LUCL, University of Leiden

The study examines finite as opposed to non-finite (infinitive) 
subordination in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), both in a diachronic and a 
synchronic perspective. The discussion is developed within the framework 
of the Principles and Parameters theory (cf. Chomsky 1995, 2001, 2004). 
In previous work I have shown that in BP epistemic predicates take 
finite complement clauses whereas directive/ causative ones take (ECM) 
infinitive complement clauses – as opposed to European Portuguese (EP), 
in which epistemic and directive predicates take both finite and 
infinitive complements. The facts about BP, as opposed to EP, were shown 
to interact with the (tendency for the) loss of subjunctive morphology 
and with the syntax of subjects and datives in this language. Looking at 
complements to epistemic and causative predicates in a diachronic 
/corpus /collected from texts produced in the Western-Central region of 
Brazil dated of the XVIII century, and further considering results in 
previous diachronic studies, the following was noted. As for causative 
predicates, two configurations are found: (i) non-inflected infinitive 
complements with an accusative/ oblique subject, the so-called Romance 
causative construction; (ii) finite complements with the embedded verb 
displaying subjunctive morphology. As for epistemic predicates, finite 
clauses are mostly found – although with the following distribution: 
while finite clauses are preferred with non-coreferential subjects, 
infinitive ones are restricted to coreferential subjects. The conclusion 
then is that regarding causative predicates, the patterns in (i) and 
(ii) were lost in BP, the innovative patterns consisting of infinitives 
in the complement position of the relevant predicate, which include 
(restructuring) mono-clausal and bi-clausal configurations. Epistemic 
predicates in turn remain realized as finite clauses, infinitives 
clauses (with coreferential subjects) being acceptable, but clearly less 
used. The fact that the development of subordination affects finiteness 
has been widely noticed in the diachrony of different languages. In the 
development of subordination in Romance languages from Latin, for 
instance, a well-known phenomenon is the loss of the so-called 
accusative-infinitive constructions in the complement position of 
epistemic and declarative predicates, of which a correlaton will be 
drawn with the syntactic realization of tense. Given the interaction 
between the manifestation of finiteness in the development of these 
languages and the lexical properties of the matrix predicate, 
contrastively defined in terms of directive and epistemic 
interpretation, it is then argued that finiteness is a gramatical 
feature under parametric variation. It is further demonstrated that 
parametric variation is also found as to whether the grammatical 
encoding of modality is determined in the left periphery, namely in the 
CP domain, or in the TP domain of the clause.




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