Semântica e representações do sentido

Resumo

In this paper we develop two kinds of reflections about the Portuguese sentence O associado do sindicato é geralmente um antigo comerciário (verbatim translation: “The member of the Union is generally a former clerk”), an instance of a construction that is frequently found in the data which served as the basis for the Project “Estudo da Gramática do ortuguês Falado”, a countrywide research project that aims at escribing the variety of Brazilian Portuguese used in urban settings. What turns such sentences into a interesting interpretation problem is the fact that the adverb geralmente is a quantifier over persons (the members of the union) instead of having its customary frequency reading. In the first part of the paper, we try to portray the kind of linguist that is puzzled by such phenomena. In doing so, we outline what are, in our opinion, the main commitments of formal semantics. In the second part of the paper, we discuss what semantic constraints are met when the quantifier reading of geralmente is triggered, and what kind of semantics is required to derive the two meanings of geralmente from a single lexical entry.