Feature interpretability and the positions of 2nd person possessives in Brazilian Portuguese

• Main Author: Bruna Karla Pereira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de São Paulo 2016-12-01
• Series: Filologia e Linguística Portuguesa
• Subjects: 2nd person possessives; DP Concord; Number features; Syntactic position; Cardinals; NumP
• Online Access: http://www.revistas.usp.br/flp/article/view/117112

Interpretability and valuation of φ-features (Chomsky, 2001; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007) have played a central role in the investigation of language universals. With regard to that, in standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as well as in other Romance languages, possessives have uninterpretable number features, which are valued via nominal agreement. However, dialects of BP, especially the one spoken in Minas Gerais, have shown that 2nd person possessives, in postnominal position, do not have number agreement with the noun. In order to account for these facts, I will argue that, in this grammar, number features on 2nd person possessives are reanalyzed as being: (i) associated with the person (rather than the noun) and (ii) interpretable. From the first postulation, ‘seu’ is expected to be the possessive for 2nd person singular, and ‘seus’ for 2nd person plural. From the second postulation, no number concord is expected to be triggered on the possessive. In addition, based on Danon (2011) and Norris (2014), I will argue that cardinals divide BP DPs into two domains in that phrases located above NumP are marked with the plural morpheme, while phrases below it are unmarked. In this sense, because prenominal possessives precede cardinals (NumP), they must be marked with the plural morpheme for nominal agreement; whereas postnominal possessives, which follow NumP, must be unmarked. Free from the plural marking associated with nominal agreement, postnominal 2nd person possessives favor the reanalysis of the morpheme ‘-s’ as indicating the number associated with person features.