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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 438–460

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Chapter 21
The focalizing ser construction in Brazilian Portuguese

 | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.21qua
Abstract
This article investigates the grammatical properties of the Focalizing ser Construction (FSC) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). It is shown that the FSC does not behave like the pseudo-cleft construction (Mioto 2012; Kato and Mioto 2016). The goal of this study is to propose an analysis that accounts for the FSC in two distinct contexts: informational focus and contrastive focus, given that the FSC in BP appears in both. The analysis presented here incorporates vP movement, low and high peripheries (Belletti 2001, 2004; Rizzi 1997), and the Se(lect)lF(ocus) head (Shlonsky 2024).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Focusing strategies in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 3.The focalizing ser-construction is not a pseudo-cleft
  • 4.Grammatical properties of focalizing ser-construction
  • 5.FSC analysis based on Shlonsky (2024)
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (31)
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