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This paper discusses two types of verbal alternation in Brazilian Portuguese that have the same profiled syntactic structure, but differ in their semantic representations and in their lexical syntactic structures. The first case is O dentista extraiu o dente do João 'The dentist extracted John's tooth', alternating with O João extraiu o dente 'João extracted his tooth'. We can interpret the alternate sentence as meaning that João had someone extract his tooth. The second case is Alguém quebrou o braço do João 'Someone broke John's arm', alternating with João quebrou o braço 'João broke his arm'. We can interpret the alternate sentence as João being the possessor of the arm that suffers the break. Based on a more finegrained approach of thematic roles, and based on a semantic representation of the events encoded by these verbs, I show here that these two forms have different interpretations due to different lexical semantic properties. Besides, these lexical semantic differences, encoded in the root elements of the verbs, are responsible for projecting distinct lexical syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary linguistics the debate about the status and character of morphology is as recurrent as it is many-sided. Succinctly put, whereas some authors disperse morphological facts over the main grammatical components, others treat morphology as a subcomponent of the lexicon whose units interact in a regular and systematic way with phonology, syntax and semantics. I contend that it is this lexical status -- which has been characterized as interfacial -- that gives morphology its shape and character. This paper reviews the different ways the lexiconmorphology is conceived, and located within the grammar, by some of the most representative models put forward in recent years, and goes through the properties that are taken to define a linguistic component. In order to illustrate the interaction of phonology, semantics and syntax that takes place whenever lexicon-morphology is involved, a brief discussion is included of a case of word-formation that clearly reveals the interface nature of morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]