Consequential Constructions in Contemporary European Portuguese: A Contribution

Abstract

The aim of this study is to provide an integrated description of consequential constructions in European contemporary Portuguese, relating their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic behavior. It will be argued that the discourse segment introduced by the connectives consequentemente , de forma que , dai (que) , de modo que , por isso , assim can be analyzed in terms of a supplement (Huddleston & Pullum 2002), not syntactically integrated with its anchor, but semantically related to it. Semantically, consequential constructions may be paraphrased by causal ones involving an adverbial subordinate clause. But, unlike causal constructions, consequential ones connect two distinct speech acts. The suppression of the consequential connective may trigger two different readings, but it will be argued that, for pragmatic reasons (Levinson 2000), the preferential reading is still the consequential one.