Double realization of verbal copies in European Portuguese emphatic affirmation

This chapter discusses European Portuguese sentences where a finite verb occurs twice. Such sentences express emphatic affirmation and are either elliptic structures produced as replies to a yes/no question presupposing a negative answer or full declaratives which contradict a preceding negative statement. The approach to European Portuguese emphatic verb reduplication developed in this chapter views the two phonologically indistinguishable verb forms as copies of the same item from the numeration, i.e. as two links of a nontrivial chain. Martins' analysis relies on Nunes's (2001, 2004) idea that the phonetic realization of multiple links of a chain is permitted as far as linearization – understood as the application of Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) – can still operate. In particular, multiple copies may be allowed when morphological reanalysis makes some copy invisible to the LCA. In the case of emphatic affirmation in European Portuguese, it is argued that verb reduplication results from the combination of verb movement to Σ_[+aff] and (subsequent) verb movement to C_[+emph], followed by morphological reanalysis of C, which renders the adjoined verb copy invisible to the LCA and immune to deletion.