An analysis of subject free relatives and matching effects in Brazilian Portuguese

Free relatives are supposed to be affected by the so-called matching effects, according to which the category/Case of the Whelement integrating this sentence must match the requirements of the matrix predicate. Some works, as the ones by Suner (1983, 1984) and Harbert (1983), have proposed that subject free relatives are free from matching effects in pro-Drop languages. Brazilian Portuguese data seem though to contradict this idea; even in subject position, free relatives must match. Focused data are interpreted in this paper (considering their syntactic and semantic behavior) not as subject free relatives, but as topicalized indirect questions. The conclusion is: Brazilian Portuguese is a 100% matching language.