Contrastive analysis of the structure of the possessivized noun phrase in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper, we compared the results of three data sets about the structure of possessive noun phrases in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, with special attention to pre-nominal possessives, as in sua casa, and post-nominal possessives, as in uma casa sua, in order to observe if it is possible to present a generalization for the behavior of this structure in the language. We used as a basis for comparison the descriptions made by Neves (1993) and Franchi (1996), who worked with speech data from NURC, and speech data from Falares Sergipanos data. The methodology adopted was the descriptive/inferential analysis, in order to observe the distribution and the association among the data. The association tests show that, in both types of possessives, there are more differences between the three samples and their results than similarities, which does not allow us to develop a generalization about the behavior of these NP to Portuguese.