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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14: Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Stony Brook, NY
Edited by Lori Repetti and Francisco Ordóñez
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14] 2018
► pp. 135–152

Chapter 8
Morphological doublets in Brazilian Portuguese wh-constructions

| State University of Campinas

This chapter contains an overview of diachronic and synchronic studies on Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions, and discusses the intriguing problem of apparent syntactic doublets, or optionality, in this domain. However, a careful examination of the diachronic order in which these patterns appear, and the variation exhibited in contemporary written and spoken corpora lead us to conclude that the co-occurring patterns do not constitute syntactic “doublets.”

Keywords: wh-questions, Brazilian Portuguese, doublets, optionality, diachrony, wh-movement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The diachronic development of wh-constructions in BP
    • 2.1The V2 period
    • 2.2The inverse [é que] cleft construction of modern Portuguese
    • 2.3The wh-in-situ construction
    • 2.4The semi-cleft wh-construction
    • 2.5The appearance of the pattern wh-SV
    • 2.6A missing cell between the wh-in-situ and the wh-que SV
  • 3.Syntactic analyses
    • 3.1Thetic and categorical sentences
    • 3.2The oldest type of wh-questions in Portuguese: The V2 construction
    • 3.3The inverse-cleft questions (WH-é que SV) as a grammaticalized V2 construction
    • 3.4From wh-movement to a fake “wh-in-situ”
    • 3.5From inverse-wh-clefts to canonic wh-clefts
    • 3.6The 20th century innovative reduced cleft Wh-que
    • 3.7The appearance of WH-SV, the most recent pattern
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.14.08kat
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