Complements of verbs of utterance and thought in Brazilian Portuguese narratives

Abstract

This paper focuses on reported speech in Brazilian Portuguese oral narratives, examining the status of direct and indirect quotations. In particular, I address the following questions: Can the clause that carries the quotation be analyzed as an objet complement of the verb of saying and thought? What syntactic, semantic, and prosodic properties of utterance/thought verbs support such treatment? The analysis shows that utterance verbs strongly project what is to come, so that the quote can accurately be taken as the object complement of the matrix verb. The paper also argues for a scalar treatment of complementation in terms of syntactic integration with the utterance verb.