STUDY OF THE POSITIONING OF THE ADVERBS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE SENTENCES

This paper aims to demonstrate results of research that sought to investigate whether the positioning of adverbs is free or not. Anchored in the Generative Theory, the hypothesis of this work is that certain adverbs occupy, in most cases, fixed positions in a sentence. Cinque (1999) and Rocha & Lopes (2015) are authors that also support the theoretical framework of this research and demonstrate, in different ways, that certain adverbs remain in fixed positions in sentences. Other adverbs, however, have no fixed position. This research, through a transcription analysis of real speech, investigated and categorized 548 adverbs present in dialogues of native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and classified eighteen types of adverbs and their respective positions. The corpus was built from recordings of lessons from a private school in Belo Horizonte, and was brought to this research for both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The results of this work demonstrated that adverbs, traditionally considered as accessory terms to a clause, which can appear in several positions in a sentence, are not always free and that certain types of adverbs appear only in fixed positions in the sentence.