Banca de DEFESA: ERICO MONTEIRO DA SILVA

FORMALIZATION OF LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS WITH FOCUSING ADVERBS SPECIFIERS IN A GRAMMAR MINIMALIST

Construção de Especificação com Advérbios. Formal Grammar. Minimalist Grammar.

The purpose of this study is to formalize the concept of Construção de Especificação com Advérbio (CEA) as a structure of formal features and to integrate these findings into the Minimalist Grammar developed by Stabler (1997), following the framework of the Minimalist Program proposed by Chomsky (1995b). For this purpose, I am employing a variant of the Minimalist Grammar (GM) proposed by Keenan e Stabler (2003). The central objective is to analyze this linguistic phenomenon and apply the results to Minimalist Grammar, aiming to explain the involved derivation steps. Sentences that feature CEA are characterized by substituting a more general and comprehensive description with a more restricted one, or by transitioning from a generic context to a more specific example, through the use of adverbs of specification, such as "mainly", "especially", and "specifically", among others. These adverbs serve the function of providing greater precision to linguistic expressions. The chosen approach employs a descriptive method to identify the structure of CEA and its relationship with other sentence elements, especially those affected by CEA. Additionally, sentence elements are transformed into con- structions composed of phonetic, semantic, syntactic, and grammatical features, with a primary focus on the formal aspects of Minimalist Grammar. Among these traits, selection traits stand out, determining the choice of a specific category (=f), licensing traits, requiring the movement of a designated expression (=f), and licensor traits, which are necessitated by an expression. The elimination of formal features is also a significant step, as it enables the activation of generative operations (select, merge, and move). The findings obtained reveal that the phenomenon in question is constituted by an adverb that specifies the verb’s argument, without, however, altering the sentence elements, thereby maintaining semantic continuity. In the context of GM, sentence construction undergoes a series of operations that identify relevant features and forward expressions to the derivational space. The integration of CEA into the sentence structure is accomplished through the operation of select, starting from an unpronounced expression, and is integrated into the structure previously constituted by expressions that lack a direct relationship. This process indicates that CEA presents syntactic independence with its own projection.