Semântica e sintaxe das orações interrogativas com o quantificador quão no português contemporâneo

Abstract

This paper discusses the semantics and the syntax of interrogative clauses (in a broad sense that encompasses the so-called subordinate exclamative clauses) with quão (‘how’) in contemporary Portuguese. It assesses the semantic value of quão as a quantifier over degrees, exploring the diversity of categories to which it applies: adjectival, adverbial or prepositional phrases, and quantifiers. It analyses the internal structure of quão-sentences, considering the variation in their sentence-initial wh-constituents. It looks at differences in the form of the quantifier (quão vs. o quão), at the compatibility with the focus-like phrase é que (typical of interrogative clauses), and at the competition between adjectival quão and adverbial quanto, both counterparts of English how. The work is centred on the analysis of contemporary usage, in the standard varieties of European and Brazilian Portuguese, and records differences between these two varieties. Data from extensive corpora of newspaper texts is used systematically. The number of different syntactic-semantic clause subtypes in these corpora is recorded in five tables in the paper.