Comparing Verbal Alternations in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The sentences in Brazilian Portuguese‘João cortou o cabelo’ and ‘João quebrou o braço’, which have their origin from sentences such as‘O cabeleireiro cortou o cabelo do João’ and ‘O menino quebrou o braço de João’, are viewed in the linguistic Brazilian literature as the same phenomenon. However, I propose in this paper that those examples, which are very productive and still not investigated,  show distinct syntactic and semantics properties, and, that is why they must be view as a different verbal alternant forms. I still propose to make an analysis and a comparison between these two kinds of verbal alternations, providing the semantic restrictions that license these occurrences.