O papel e o estatuto formal dos particípios nas passivas verbais

Abstract

This paper investigates the internal structure of verbal passives in Brazilian Portuguese and, in particular, of the participle found in this construction. Under the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle; Marantz, 1993; Marantz, 1997), our goal is to establish a syntactic derivation capable of not only describing the morphological constitution of passives, but also explaining the participle’s contribution to the structure. In the literature, most authors assume that the participle in passives is the exponent of a passive head or of a passive flavor of Voice. This does not explain its categorial mixed (verbal/adjectival) behavior or the formal need for such element in the passive structure. We propose the participle is a mixed category, in the sense of Panagiotidis (2015), resorting to the author’s functional categorizer Switch, an element that is capable of interrupting the sequence of extended projections of a category and converting it into another one. By merging a Switch over the base verb’s extended projection, an adjective is formed which preserves the already-built verbal properties. Regardless of the particularities in its formation, however, the participle is, in terms of category, an adjective in syntax. This derivation explains the ambiguous behavior of this form: the participle carries verbal material, but is considered an adjective for the purposes of later syntactic operations.
Keywords: Passive. Participle. Switch. Distributed Morphology.