Preposition omission before indirect questions in contemporary standard European Portuguese

Telmo Móia

doi:10.5817/ERB2024-4-7

Preposition omission before indirect questions in contemporary standard European Portuguese

Vol.45,No.4(2024)

Telmo Móia

https://doi.org/10.5817/ERB2024-4-7

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.81317

PDF (Portuguese)

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of argumental prepositions, mainly de 'of' and sobre 'about', before subordinate interrogative clauses, used as complements, examining the tendency – discussed in the literature – to suppress them. Three different types of interrogatives will be considered: yes-no questions, wh-questions headed by an interrogative morpheme, and wh-questions headed by a preposition. These constructions represent an unstable area in the (neutral or formal) written registers of contemporary European Portuguese, with no universal consensus among speakers as to the full acceptance of some combinations. Starting with discussions in the literature, the issue will be reassessed with corpus data (mainly) from Portuguese newspaper texts. The analysis considers predominantly stylistic issues, since there seems to be no strict ungrammaticality in any of the major combinations surveyed, although some are infrequently used (and perhaps actively avoided) in the mentioned written registers, while being very frequent in more informal oral registers.

Keywords:
indirect questions; prepositions; language variation

Pages:
128–151

References

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