Point-of-View Adverbs in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of POV adverbs in Portuguese, with the aim of delineating their lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties in comparison with other adverbial classes. Within the Lexicon–Grammar framework, the analysis shows that POV adverbs display several properties typically associated with sentence-internal modifiers, although their distribution also overlaps with that of sentence-external modifiers. The study discusses this classification in detail on the basis of a lexicon of 745 -mente adverbs, 13 compound adverbs, and a set of adverbial constructions built with different operator-nouns. The analysis further identifies two additional subclasses of POV adverbs: demonym-derived and eponym-derived forms which convey culturally and intellectually groundedperspectives. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document these formations as a productive subclass of POV adverbs in Portuguese and to offer a preliminary corpus-based account of their syntactic behavior and distribution.