Does Inflection Matter? A few More Notes on BP Inflected Infinitives

Abstract

This chapter argues, mainly based on Brazilian history, that nonfnite inflection (NI) cannot be a just a product of schooling (and not a feature of Brazilian Portuguese), since it is commonly used by mass media and people who speak Standard BP. BP speakers have native judgments on the distribution of NI, and those judgements are not what one would expect if those speakers were following the grammar taught in Brazilian schools, as shown by the experimental results of Modesto and Maia (2017). It is then concluded that results already obtained by the study of NI are scientifcally interesting. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2017.v13n2a13508