<Ficar + gerund> in European Portuguese

Abstract

<Ficar + gerund> is a construction that focuses on the ‘beginning’ of the situation denoted by the predicate whose core is the verb form of the gerund. This value, the “inceptive”, is also expressed by a relatively large number of other constructions, of which começar a, pôr-se a, romper a, meter-se a + infinitive are just a few examples. Consequently, the central objective of this article is to investigate the peculiarities of the construction under scope. To this end, and almost always using a corpus made up of authentic language material, collected exclusively in literary texts (late 20^th century, almost all), I (will) call forth several arguments, both of a structural and syntactic-semantic nature.