EU ACABEI DE ESCREVER O ARTIGO (I HAVE JUST WRITTEN THE PAPER/I FINISHED WRITING THE PAPER) – A STUDY OF AMBIGUITY IN SENTENCES WITH THE VERB ACABAR

ABSTRACT: Sentences including the verb acabar followed by an infinitive clause headed by the preposition de have two readings: one, which I will call culminative reading, points out to the smallest final sub-event of an event denoted by the verb of the infinitive clause; the other, which I will call recency reading, places the time of the event of the infinitive clause immediately before another time taken as reference. In this paper, I propose that the two readings involve structures and interpretations of the verb acabar radically different. This work, assuming the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, shows evidences that: (1) in culminative reading, we typically have control, while in the recency reading, raising; (2) the infinitive sentences in the recency reading convey temporal/aspectual information not conveyed by the infinitives in culminative reading; (3) while in culminative reading the verb acabar introduces a sub-event of the event denoted by the infinitive sentence, in the recency reading the verb only conveys a set of temporal relations.