A formal proposal for the reanalysis of the verb ir in Brazilian Portuguese: from lexical to functional

Abstract

Some authors have already showed that the Romance futurity expression went by a cyclic process, alternating between a synthetic form and a periphrastic one. This is due to the reanalysis of some item that becomes (more) functional, replacing the synthetic form. In this sense, this paper investigates the reanalysis phenomenon of verb ir, aiming to capture the syntactic changes this item went by on BP history. Therefore, we analyze Brazilian roles from the 16^th to the 21^st century. We show that the verb ir behaved as a lexical verb, conveying spatial displacement, initially. Later, such verb was reanalyzed and became more functional, behaving like an auxiliary. The innovation of the present study is to show that verb ir did not go by a reanalysis directly to convey futurity, a potential event. Instead, there seems to have been a previous step in that process, where ir conveys prospection, i.e., an action that happens immediately after the speech. Assuming Roberts and Roussou (2003) and Roberts (2007), we propose that two syntactic consequences have arisen from lexical to functional verb: lose of formal features and an upward functional projections lexicalization. Thus, this paper features a explanatory formal proposal to the verb ir reanalysis in BP.