The Change in ‘se apaixonar’: Nanosyntax, Semantics, Cognition, and Government

Abstract

In this work, I investigate the phenomenon of change in the government of the verb se apaixonar (‘to fall in love’) in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, characterized by the substitution of the canonical preposition por (‘by/for’) with the preposition em (‘in/on/at’) (e.g., me apaixonei no samba). Under the framework of the interface between Nanosyntax and Formal Semantics (Ferreira, 2021), complemented by principles of Cognitive Linguistics, I advance hypotheses for the analysis of the phenomenon and its motivation. I maintain that the use of em reflects a reanalysis of the verb’s argument structure: the object of affection ceases to be projected as a Causer/Agent (the one who triggers the feeling) and is instead projected as an Abstract Focus or Locative. I argue that this shift is driven by analogy to a cluster (Bybee, 2010) of mental state verbs (such as pensar em, focar em, ter crush em) and grounded in the Container Metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003), in which the state of passion is conceptualized as a domain of immersion. Formally, I demonstrate that the grammaticality of the new construction derives from the flexibility of the nanosyntactic architecture: by not projecting the full functional structure required to create a physical place, the preposition em retains only its lexical concept of “inclusion/contact”. This allows the speaker to use the preposition to mark a “notional place” (the target of the passion). I conclude that the form se apaixonar em does not constitute an error, but a systematic innovation, in which usage pressure exploits a formal possibility of the language to express a new conceptualization of the feeling as focus and immersion.