Unaccusative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese: a possible categorization

Abstract

This paper describes the Portuguese unaccusative verbs in terms of two main categories: primitive and derivate unaccusatives. The fi rst 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 1986) in terms of the VP Shell hypothesis proposed in Larson (1988) and assumed by Chomsky (1995).