The left-peripheral syntax of Brazilian Portuguese cadê
Brian Gravely, Timothy Gupton
December 2023 

The heterogeneity of wh-words in Romance is expectedly strong although, to date, there has been relatively little work having explored non-canonical interrogative elements. In this paper, we explore the syntax of cadê in Brazilian Portuguese, a reanalyzed functional item from the string '(O) que é de…?' (da Silva Menon 2014). We show that the distribution of cadê feeds an interpretation of a null-copular construction in that it may not be used with a verb. Instead, it selects a lone DP argument which whose interpretation may be understood as ‘Where is/are (X)?’. We briefly discuss comparable functional items in Romance and elaborate on an analysis that shows that cadê has several verbal properties which allow us to consider a syntactic approach that mirrors vº-Tº-Cº verb movement.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007196 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Wh-exclamatives, Imperatives and Wh-questions (De Gruyter)
keywords:	interrogative, null-copula, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [April 2023] v1 [March 2023]
Downloaded:	890 times

 

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