A semantic approach to the adverbs ending in 'mente' in Brazilian Portuguese

This article aims at verifying the efficiency of a semantic approach to the distributive and interpretative proprieties of some types of Brazilian Portuguese - mente adverbs: speaker-oriented, subject-oriented, manner and degree adverbs. The analyses proposed is based on Ernst (2001), which is mainly based on lexicosemantic proprieties and attribution of scope of adverbs. According to this proposal, the adverbs in study are considered gradual predicates that select semantic arguments of the type event or proposition in a gradual scale in which proposition is superior to fact which is superior to external event which, in its turn, is superior to internal event. Thus, a sentence like "Obviously, Marcos wisely did not do his test in half an hour." would be formed by the following calculus: the core event of "do a test" is converted into another type of event - a process - by the PP "in half an hour", forming "do the test in half an hour". Negation converts it into a state, forming " not do the test in half an hour". Then, the past tense converts an event/state into another one of the same type, and the adverb "wisely" does the same thing. After the formation of the last event, it is freely converted into a proposition which serves as internal argument for the adverb "obviously". Finally, this adverb takes the proposition and converts it into another one. I also highlight the fact that the adopted proposal considers principles of the Weight Theory in determining some positions of adverbs.