Estructuras focalizadoras em español y portugués

Abstract

The present study, based in Sedano's (1994) methodology and results, analyses the variation between the pseudocleft clauses (SH) and the clauses with the focalizing verb ser (SF) found in Spanish and Portuguese literary works with the purpose of describing the behaviour of these structures in both languages.

The results show that only SH clauses appear in written Spanish whereas both SH and SF clauses are registered in written Portuguese. The analysis of latter indicates that SH clauses are mainly used to focalize noun phrases while SF clauses are mainly used to focalize prepositional phrases. The results in the case of the Portuguese coincide with those of Sedano's (1994) in a corpus of spoken Spanish of Caracas. The findings confirm that the selection of either structures are conditioned by communicative-functional reasons depending on the grammatical category being focalized.