Investigating the construction of telicity in BrP: a comparison between 'towards' and 'up to'

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the role of the prepositions ‘para’ (towards) and ‘até’ (to) in the construction of telicity in Brazilian Portuguese, in sentences like “Ana run to the pharmacy”. According to Nam (2004) and Filip (2004), any preposition that indicates the final point of a path (the movement’s goal) is able to insert telicity in the event structure, however the BrP data do not seem to sustain this hypothesis. Thus, in order to figure out how ‘para’ and ‘até’ act on the licensing of telicity to events typically classified as atelic (activities and semelfactives), we explore the semantic behavior of these items and discuss what the literature recognizes as telicity. We will demonstrate that ‘para’ and ‘até’ carry distinct properties, such as transition, delimitation and cumulativity, and it is the interaction of these properties in the algebra between the VP and the PP what makes an event to be classified as telic when these items are present in the structure. In addition, we discuss the behavior of ‘para’ and ‘até’ in non-spatial contexts, to demonstrate that although bound is a fundamental concept in the classification of these prepositions, this property is not equivalent to the concept of telicity, as it is assumed in the literature (Jackendoff, 2010).