Verb-framed and satellite-framed patterns in Brazilian and European Portuguese

Abstract: The goal of this work is to contribute to the understanding of the framing typological domain of motion events in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) through corpus analysis of intransitive pleonastic double Path constructions, which are constructions that express ‘the same’ trajectory in both the verb and its satellite. Data has been retrieved from the ptTenTen11 corpus.  Traditionally Portuguese is described as a verb-framed language, meaning that it expresses the semantic trajectory component (Path) in the verb, rather than in the satellite.The double Path constructions are interesting since they do not have a ‘clear place’ within the framing typological approach to motion. The Boundary crossing constraint, which is well- known and studied constraint in Spanish, but that has not been found in studies on Portuguese is also analyzed here. With these two entry points an attempt is made to relate BP and EP to the framing typological classification into language types.  The double Path constructions appear to be more frequent in EP than in BP and no challenges to the Boundary crossing constraint are identified in the data for either of the Portuguese varieties.