The anaphoric verb fazer ‘to do’ in structures expressing conformity and in comparative clauses

language variation in contemporary Portuguese

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of the anaphoric verb fazer (‘to do’), used alone or in combination with the demonstrative clitic o (‘it’), forming the complex (possibly discontinuous) anaphoric phrase fazer+o, in two types of syntactic constructions, with comparable grammatical properties: structures expressing conformity introduced by the connective como ‘as’, or variants of it like tal como ‘such as’ (e.g. o Governo aumentou os impostos este ano, (tal) como já (o) tinha feito o ano passado ‘the Government raised taxes this year, as it had already done last year’), and comparative clauses (a indústria siderúrgica polui menos atualmente do que (o) fazia no passado ‘the steel industry pollutes less nowadays than it did in the past’; o Presidente da República promulgou mais leis este ano do que (o) fez o ano passado ‘the President of the Republic enacted more laws this year than he did last year’). The variation in the form of the anaphoric expression, fazer vs. fazer +o (but not e.g. fazer+isso, with a non clitic demonstrative pronoun), which is specific to these two subordinate constructions, is analysed. The grammatical requirements affecting anaphoric chains with fazer in these contructions are discussed in detail. On the one hand, it is observed that the mechanisms for building anaphoric chains with fazer are often quite complex, involving “antecedent reconstruction” from the linguistic material in the matrix structures. On the other hand, it is underlined that anaphoric chains with fazer, which are typically associated with an actional value expressed by an action verb in the active form within the antecedent, sometimes appear in sequences with different values and/or forms, whose acceptance is possibly not consensual among speakers. In fact, structures expressing conformity and comparative clauses with the anaphoric verb fazer represent a somewhat unstable and change-prone area of the language, where sequences without the prototypical morphosyntactic and semantic requirements (e.g. with an action verb in the passive participle form, or without an action verb, in the antecedent) emerge with some frequency in written texts. Data from corpora of (predominantly Portuguese) newspaper texts and of literary texts are used to illustrate and/or corroborate the analyses.