The caused-motion and the ditransitive constructions: polysemy links

Abstract

This work compares two argument structure constructions in Brazilian Portuguese – the caused-motion construction and the ditransitive construction – in order to investigate their links of polysemy, based on shared syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. According to Goldberg (1995), constructions are typically associated with a family of distinct but related senses, forming an interrelated network. This seems to be the case of the constructions investigated here. The analysis of real instances of these constructions shows that they share the same syntactic pattern, although they differ in meaning.