Descrição da oração sem sujeito em língua portuguesa: função, caracterização e uso

Abstract

Subject-absent sentences are all and every sentence devoid of subject Nominal Phrase (NP), except in cases when NP is in ellipse. They occur in the language on personal or impersonal terms. On impersonal terms, they include essential occurrences, here called phenomenological occurrences and accidental occurrences, here called a-personalized occurrences. While on personal terms, they appear in cases of indetermination of the agent by ommission of subject NP, also known as indeterminate subject cases, and through the ergativization process in their secondary version. This kind of ergativization process acts on non-causative verbs, and has been the basis for the construction of most sentences devoid of subject NP in Brazilian Portuguese. In this thesis, we describe all structures indicated above, in terms of their morphosyntactic behavior in the language, as we argue that to describe subject-absence sentence means to identify morphosyntactic contexts for exemption of the subject NP, in different degrees. For this goal, we make use of a prototypical approach to the language, through which we engage with the gradual nature of our object of study