Motion verbs and directional prepositions

Authors

  • António Leal Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto / FLUP
  • Fátima Oliveira Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto / FLUP
  • Purificação Silvano Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto / FLUP

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln3ano2017a8

Keywords:

verbs of movement, prepositions, aspect, telicity

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to study the semantics of verbs of inherently directed motion (Levin, 1993) ir (‘go’) and vir (‘come’) combined with prepositional phrases with the thematic role of Goal, headed by the prepositions para (‘to) and até (‘to’) in European Portuguese. The data from our news-based-corpus reveals that both prepositions can occur with motion verbs without any apparent restrictions and introduce complements of the verbs ir and vir, although they carry slightly different interpretations: with para, there is a reading that the entity that undergoes movement remains longer in destination than with até. When these prepositions occur within predications that describe non-physical movement, the restrictions increase. The contribution of these prepositions to the determination of the aspectual profile of predications that represent events of movement, namely telicity, poses some theoretical problems, which will also be addressed. This paper puts forward some hypotheses of explanation of the data to be developed in future work.

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Published

2017-09-29

How to Cite

Leal, A., Oliveira, F., & Silvano, P. (2017). Motion verbs and directional prepositions. Journal of the Portuguese Linguistics Association, (3), 119–133. https://doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln3ano2017a8

Issue

No. 3 (2017): Journal of the Portuguese Linguistics Association

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2017 António Leal, Fátima Oliveira, Purificação Silvano

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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