This collection of papers discusses some of the major syntactic properties of Brazilian Portuguese from a minimalist perspective. The volume focuses on movement and empty category issues and brings new empirical material on a variety of topics (null subjects and finite control, possessive and… read more
This volume brings together papers which address issues regarding the copy theory of movement. According to this theory, a trace is a copy of the moved element that is deleted in the phonological component but is available for interpretation at L(ogical) F(orm). Thus far, the bulk of the research… read more
This paper rethinks Holmberg’s (2005) characterization of partial vs. consistent null subject languages (NSL) based on data from Brazilian and European Portuguese, the former a partial, the latter a consistent NSL. The paper proposes that rather than overt morphological distinctions, what is… read more
In this paper I argue that locative agreement and possessor raising in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) should be subsumed under Nunes’s (2008) analysis of hyper-raising in BP. More specifically, I propose that these unorthodox instances of A-movement in BP do not violate minimality, for the crossed… read more
This paper examines a surprising correlation between adjunct control and wh-movement in Portuguese: object control into an adjunct clause may be allowed in addition to subject control if the matrix object undergoes wh-movement. Assuming Hornstein’s (2001) account of adjunct control within the… read more
This paper discusses some acquisition issues involved in the syntactic changes that affected the distribution and interpretation of null subjects and null objects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Based on work by Ferreira (2000) and Nunes (2008a), I argue that the emergence of finite control in BP was… read more
In this paper we examine null possessor constructions in Brazilian Portuguese, which display an anaphoric behavior in some contexts but a pronominal behavior in others. We show that in absence of islands separating a null possessor from its antecedent, null possessors display properties of… read more
Based on Kayne’s (1994) analysis of relative clauses, this paper proposes a uniform account of the three types of relative clauses found in Brazilian Portuguese: the standard version (with pied-piping), the resumptive version with an overt pronoun, and the PP-chopping version, where the relativized… read more
This paper discusses constructions in Brazilian Portuguese in which a null subject is adequately licensed only if the clause containing it is preceded by the dummy preposition de. Assuming that referential null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese are traces of A-movement (see Ferreira 2000, 2004 and… read more
In this paper we discuss data from Brazilian Portuguese which arguably involve one instance of a preposition in the syntactic component but end up surfacing with two instances, yielding what at first sight looks like PP coordination. We argue that the copying of the preposition takes place in the… read more
In this paper we investigate grammatical cases of verbal and nominal ellipsis in which there is no full morphological identity between the antecedent and the elided constituent. We argue that lack of identity in these cases can be captured if inflectional material is hosted by functional categories… read more
In this paper we discuss several constructions with null objects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), based on Santos’s (2002, 2003) arguments that stress shift in BP is blocked by pro, but not by traces. In particular, we show that stress shift provides evidence for an analysis of PP-chopping relatives… read more
This paper discusses reflexive and control constructions in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Lee 2003) and Hmong (Mortensen 2003), where instead of a reflexive in the former and a null category in the latter, one may find a copy of the antecedent. The paper argues that these constructions provide… read more
Based on previous work by Bošković (2001, 2002, 2004a,b) and Nunes (1999, 2004), this chapter discusses a considerable amount of evidence involving A-movement, A'-movement, head movement, and remnant movement that points to the conclusion that “traces” (i.e. copies structurally lower in the… read more
