Unaccusative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese: a possible categorization

This paper describes the Portuguese unaccusative verbs in terms of two main categories: primitive and derivate unaccusatives. The first category contains the unaccusatives that do not derive from transitive structures and cannot select more than one complement. The second class contains the psych-verbs and the unaccusatives that do take turn with transitive constructions. The paper points out that it is possible to interpret Burzio generalization (Burzio 1986BURZIO, L. 1986. Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel.) in terms of the VP Shell hypothesis proposed in Larson (1988)LARSON, R. K. 1988. On the Double Object Construction. Linguistic Inquiry, 19 (3): 335-391. and assumed by Chomsky (1995)______. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press..

generative grammar; unaccusative verbs; categorization; VP shell