Preposition stranding in Portuguese: we need to talk about.
Preposition stranding; Preposition orphaning; Brazilian Portuguese; Preposition; Null pronoun.
In this thesis, we investigate the supposed occurrences of preposition stranding in Brazilian Portuguese. Since Jackendoff (1973), the phenomenon of preposition stranding, in which a preposition is separated from its complement via movement, has been claimed to be very rare crosslinguistically, being widely attested only in a few Germanic languages, such as English and Danish. Notwithstanding a few exceptions in varieties of North American French (Roberge & Rosen, 1999), preposition stranding is disallowed across the Romance language branch. In Brazilian Portuguese, however, a few prepositions – namely contra, sem, sobre and, less frequently, com – have increasingly been used without an immediately adjacent overt complement, in both relative clauses, like O candidato que João votou contra, and topicalized sentences with either an intra-sentential or discourse-recoverable topic, such as Não vejo ninguém comentando sobre. In analyzing these types of constructions, we argue against the hypothesis that Brazilian Portuguese prepositions can be stranded. By building on Salles (1997), Roberge & Rosen (1999), Kato (2010) and Roberge (2012), we propose that the seeming instances of preposition stranding in Brazilian Portuguese differ from those tipically found in English in that they are not derived by wh-movement, but rather involve a base-generated null pronoun (pro) coreferential to an operator. We further maintain that what is occurring in Portuguese is actually preposition orphaning and that features like semantic content and stage of grammaticalization determine which prepositions can license a null complement.