External possession in portuguese

Abstract

In this paper we look at external possession structures in Portuguese, which sharessome properties with other Romance languages, but shows a much wider range ofpossessor datives as they are not restricted to human possessors and are possibleeven with state verbs. Possessor raising structures were also considered and we showthat they are restricted to the transitive, non-causative variant of Agent/PossessorAlternation verbs.In order to understand why the external possession structures common to Romanceinvolve part-whole relations and present the event as a change that affects the possessor,we consider the properties of affectees in terms of Proto-Roles, the characterizationof the part-whole relation as the semantic R-integrated relation, and an Affectednesshierarchy defined in terms of a scalar structure measuring the degree of changesuffered by the object of the verb.As for Portuguese external possession structures which depart from the ones found inmore restrictive Romance languages, it is suggested that their analysis requires makingassumptions about the internal structure of the affected Theme when possessum andpossessor hold a part-whole relation and about the grammaticalization of the affectedfeature in some languages.We suggest that Portuguese encodes affectedness in a functional head of the v-Vsystem and we assume that this head, of aspectual nature, is a complement of v, selectsVP as its complement, and, following Fernández-Alcalde (2014: 81) for Spanish,plays a double role: semantically, it is the locus of the affected interpretation found inthe dative argument; syntactically, this head is responsible for dative case assignmentto the DP via agreement.