Agreement patterns with a gente in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a description of different agreement patterns with ‘a gente’ (we) in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We consider the verbal agreement patterns and the gender-number agreement patterns in predicative structures. It will be shown that the behavior of ‘a gente’ is quite similar in both varieties of Portuguese, the differences being mainly in quantitative than in grammatical terms. The data analyzed provide evidence that, differently from the binding domain, the agreement domain seems to present no restriction to the actuation of grammatical and semantic features of ‘a gente’. The theoretical claim is that EP and BP have the same grammar of ‘a gente’, which can be described from a single set of phi-features.