The durative verbs of portuguese

Résumé 0

In this paper, I will discuss the expression of duration and temporal location via predicate-argument combinations in Portuguese. The focus will be on what we can term “durative verbs”- like the counterparts of English last, spend and take (corresponding in Portuguese to at least six extremely common verbs: durar, prolongar-se, arrastar-se, passar, levar and demorar) -, which exhibit a few intriguing grammatical idiosyncrasies. Corpora data from European and Brazilian Portuguese will be used, in an attempt to show that the constructions under analysis reveal a considerable amount of variation and are prone to (linguistic change-evincive) anomaly, having to do mainly with the use of temporal prepositions or preposition-like connectives. Formal analyses - to be made within the Discourse Representation Theory framework - will also be presented. These are meant to underline that the semantic contribution of homonymous elements may be variable across different construction patterns, which undoubtedly correlates with their somewhat unstable grammatical behaviour in contemporary Portuguese.