Incorporated Arguments in Brazilian Portuguese: The Case of Elocution Events

Abstract

This article constitutes an extension of Duarte’s (2025) dissertation. We investigated the elocution event in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), focusing on the incorporation of participants into elocution verbs such as agradecer (thank), criticar (criticize), lamentar (lament), and reclamar (complain). We assume that the elocution event includes the participants speaker, message, topic, medium, and addressee, as illustrated by constructions such as João contou uma história para Maria (João told a story to Maria) and Ele elogiou a estrutura da equipe (He praised the team’s structure). The main objective was to describe which participants can be incorporated into the verb and to explain the semantic-constructional motivations underlying this phenomenon. Our theoretical framework was grounded in Cognitive-Functional Linguistics, especially Construction Grammar (Croft, 2022) and Force Dynamics theory (Talmy, 1976; Croft, 2012, 2021; Kalm, 2022), articulated with the notions of causal chain and incorporated argument. Methodologically, we conducted a reanalysis of the data presented in Duarte (2025), expanding the empirical scope through the investigation of ten elocution verbs in occurrences found in Corpus Brasileiro. The analysis showed that only message and medium are eligible for incorporation, as in Ele elogiou a aula (He praised the class) (message incorporation) and O economista telefonou que o plano falhou (The economist phoned that the plan had failed) (medium incorporation). In contrast, speaker and addressee remained external to the verbal nucleus because they occupy the extremes of the event’s causal chain, while topic was interpreted as an element of reference and, for this reason, was also unable to be incorporated into the verb. The incorporation into verbs of elocution, therefore, is limited to message and medium participants, which reflects the interaction between verbal construal and argument structure constructions, and supports a constructional approach based on force dynamics.