Resumen de Predicative constructions with gerunds in european portuguese dialects

Sílvia Afonso Pereira

• This study analyzes dialectal data collected from CORDIAL - SIN, an annotated corpus of Portuguese dialects, and addresses predicative constructions with gerunds: a non - standard construction found in some European Portuguese dialects, which is equivalent to the standard Portuguese structure where a preposition followed by an infinitive is used. I show that this non - standard construction is geographically confined to the south of Portugal and some insular dialects. This type of geographic distribution has been identified in previous works on dialect syntax, and my data now brings additional evidence to support the hypothesis that it seems to correspond to a basic division of Portuguese dialects. This geographic distribution highlights that predicative gerunds a re, along with progressive gerunds with estar ‘to be’, a clear example of syntactic alternation in European Portuguese between gerunds and prepositional infinitives.