earticle

영어

Portuguese prepositions a and para have almost same syntactic and semantic features so that, in many cases, a appears at the place of para and vice-versa. However, in some cases, contrary to the expectation, they show complementary distribution excluding each other. This means that they have some different syntactic or semantic features that have been ignored in the precedent studies and researches as I shortly remarked here. And I am very convinced that these differences can be clarified only by the cognitive semantic approaches. Above two portuguese prepositions are generally used to denote a direction having in common [+direction] feature. This is the reason why they have same syntactic distributions. However, they have another feature different [±movement]. I supposed here that their complementary distribution is due to this feature which is present with a and absent with para. [+movement] is déplacement meaning moving action from some place to other place while [-movement] reinforce state instead of déplacement or movement itself.