Syntactic and Semantic aspects of ‘perigar’ verb

Abstract

‘Perigar’ is a verb that appears in several constructions of BP, such as ‘periga chover’, and its grammatical features were not yet described. In order to fill this gap, we provide a syntactic description following syntactic cartography (CINQUE, 1999; 2006; DRUBIG, 2001; TSAI, 2015) and a semantic description following formal semantics (KRATZER, 1981; 1991; CONDORAVDI, 2002; von FINTEL, 2006; von FINTEL; HEIM, 2011; HACQUARD, 2011). To provide such a description, we have adopted two methodological procedures: (i) collecting and analyzing spontaneous data from Facebook and (ii) applying syntactic and semantic tests using the introspective method. In the first step, we were able to get one hundred sentences with the verb ‘perigar’ which were analyzed syntactically and semantically in order to formulate some hypothesis about this verb. In order to test them, we have done some syntactic and semantic tests using the introspective method. The syntactic tests’ goal was to verify if it was an auxiliary modal verb or if it was a lexical verb. The semantic tests’ goal was to verify which aspects were lexicalized. The syntactic tests have shown that it can be considered an unaccusative lexical verb lexical. On the other hand, the semantic tests have shown that it resembles modal verbs in some aspects since it takes only a proposition as an argument and has an existential quantification force, but it also resembles lexical verbs in some aspects since the modal base is lexicalized in the verb.