Eckhard Bick - VISL

(2b) Interfering material in preposition-infinitive sequences
As might be expected, the most common interfering material are direct object
pronouns, especially the reflexive “se”, but to his possible surprise, the student will
now encounter the quite special Portuguese construction of a “nominal” infinitive
with an article (second example), and - quantification making for good research
instinct - he may continue with individual word class and function searches:
PRP_?_PERS @ACC>_?_INF @#ICL-P< 75
PRP_?_PERS @SUBJ>_?_INF @#ICL-P< 36
PRP_(@>N)?_N @SUBJ>_(@NN_INF 80
A look at the 80 preposition-article-infinitive-sequences shows, that most are of the
type “ao +INF” (a special construction translating as subclauses of the type ‘when
VFIN’). Precise checks show that this case alone accounts for 76 of the 80 examples,
and that articles before infinitives are all but nonexistent without a preposition, since
removing ‘PRP’ from the search string only raises the number of hits by one, to 81:
“a” PRP_ DET @>N_INF 76
DET @>N_INF 81
An inspection of the 51 cases with interfering adverbs suggests a closed list: “não” is
by far the most common, with 1 example each of “tanto”, “melhor” and “também”,
and 2 instances of “jamais”. Only in one case is there both a pronoun and an adverb.
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