Constructions with the Brazilian Portuguese Verb dar and Borer's Syntactic Hypothesis of the Predicative Base

It is demonstrated that the atelic nature of Brazilian Portuguese constructions of the type dar uma olhada no bebe 'to throw a glance at the baby' poses problems for an analysis based on H. Borer's (1994) hypothesis pertaining to argument projection. Her proposal is based on the assumption that the description of inaccusativity & inergativity must take into account the properties of the whole predicate structure & not be limited to only the specifications of the lexical item. Given the peculiar properties of the prepositional phrase in such constructions, Borer's proposal of atelic reading for inergative constructions which do not project [Spec, AspP] also falls short of providing a satisfactory solution. It is demonstrated that the thematic properties displayed by the noun in the prepositional phrase prevent the representation attributed to it in Borer's analysis. 16 References. Z. Dubiel