2025/09/08 by Luís Filipe Cunha · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · doi:10.16995/jpl.17946
openalex publication_date 2025/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/09/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Abstract. The main goal of this article is to provide a semantic characterisation for the structure estar por (literally, ‘be by’) + infinitive in European Portuguese. The combinatorial restrictions that this construction displays regarding the aspectual class of the predications with which it can cooccur suggest that it takes telic events as its input. Moreover, its linguistic behaviour parallels that of states. The connections between estar por + infinitive and adjectival passives, on the one hand, and sentential negation, on the other, lead us to propose an analysis that treats this configuration as a denied resultant state. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by the brief comparison that we put forward between estar por and ficar por + infinitive.