A polysemy account of alternating verbs of creation in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Verbs of creation such aswriteandpaint, in English and in other languages, occur in two distinct types of sentences: transitive or intransitive (The teacher wrote the letter/The teacher wrote (a lot)andThe artist painted a picture/The artist painted (a lot)). In this paper, we provide an analysis of such syntactic alternation, drawing on data from Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that this syntactic phenomenon is triggered by a semantic process of polysemy, and not by an argument alternation, as is assumed by some authors. We show evidence to support our proposal, namely, the distinct aspectual interpretations of the different sentences with verbs of creation, the distinct prefixation withre- in the transitive and intransitive forms, and the polysemy found in the nominalizations of the analyzed verbs. In order to formalize our semantic account, we propose a type of representation, a predicate decomposition structure enriched by a simple truth-conditional semantics of the root.