The syntax of (ditransitive) predicates of transference in Dialectal Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This article examines the syntax of ditransitive predicates of transference in Dialectal Brazilian Portuguese (DBP), as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) as well as other Romance languages. It is shown that in DBP and BP the goal argument is realized by the dative preposition para ‘to’, instead of the dative preposition a ‘to’, and the dative clitic lhe(s) ‘to him/her/them’, both found in EP (and other Romance languages). DBP further has a Double Object Construction (DOC) that is argued to be of the English DOC type, although it allows both the goal-theme and the theme-goal word orders. We further take into consideration the presence of reduced and non-reduced pronominal forms in DBP, which are found in all syntactic positions (subject, V complement, P complement, and DOC), except in the theme-goal word order of DOC, in which reduced forms in the singular are not found.