Marcação Explícita de Tópicos com a Locução Prepositiva quanto a e Afins

Abstract

In this paper, a general semantic and syntactic characterisation of the topics introduced by connectives such as quanto a – the Portuguese counterpart of English as for – will be attempted. The grammatical differences between these topics and those that are merely signaled via syntactic ordering or intonational devices will be highlighted. These differences include both semantic properties (e.g. the type of reference chains allowed) and syntactic properties (e.g. recursion, position, sensitivity to islands constraints). A connection with discourse mechanisms – of the cohesion-coherence type – in the constructions with lexically explicit topic markers will also be underlined.