A estrutura interna dos pronomes pessoais em português brasileiro.

• Ano de defesa: 2008
• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Danniel da Silva
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Alagoas; BR; Linguística; Literatura Brasileira; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras e Linguística; UFAL
• Palavras-chave em Português: Agreement; Syntax; Case Theory; φ -features; Underspecification; Concordância; Sintaxe; Teoria do caso; Traços-φ Subespecificação; CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.ufal.br/handle/riufal/528

In this thesis, I develop a lexicon-syntactic study about the internal structure of the personal pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP), aiming the investigation of which the formative features of a pronoun in BP are and their relationship with the syncretism phenomenon. Empirically, I show a description of the internal structure of the personal pronouns in BP, showing that the traditional φ-features which build a pronoun (person, number and gender) are actually categories which bare more elemental features which define the content and the shape of a pronoun. More elementary component structures of the categories person, number and gender are able to describe satisfactorily the pronoun paradigm in BP. Therefore, the different pronouns (and their syntactic roles) can be described through their inner composition, holding some features, such as [SPECIFIC], once considered out of their structure. Theoretically, I define which elementary formative features that form a pronoun are, how this composition is made and which its syntactic consequences are. To do so, I adopt a feature geometry developed based on Harley & Ritter (2002) and Béjar (2003)`s proposals. I assume, then, that the pronoun formative features obey a hierarchy which is based on underspecification. The φ-theory proposed by Béjar (2003; 2008) supports adequately the pronoun compositionality developed for BP. Likewise, decomposition for Case categories is made as an optimal solution for Case configuration, which takes into account evidence from languages like English and BP, which present Case differences only in their personal pronouns. Case, then, is treated geometrically, analogue to that proposed to φ-features. As a result, Case categories in BP obey the geometry [C[OBL[GEN][ABL]]]. A value mechanism for these features is proposed also analogue to the one for φ-features.