ABSTRACT

European Portuguese sharply distinguishes itself from the other Romance languages in that it jointly displays three phenomena, which are lacking elsewhere: (i) VP ellipsis structures in which the elided constituent is governed either by an auxiliary or by a main verb; (ii) enclisis in affirmative declarative root clauses; and (iii) the interpretive properties of the pretérito perfeito composto, which never functions as an aorist, but forces the iterative interpretation of the eventuality described. Starting from the observation that, although quite different in nature, (i)–(iii) all involve the verb phrase and its relation to the inflectional domain, the article shows that the Derivation by Phase approach to syntactic relations paves the way to a principled explanation of the observed correlation, once it is combined with a general claim about the feature endowment of v and the various ways its [tense] feature can be valued. The analysis also sheds some light on the asymmetry between the languages that display VP ellipsis and those that don’t.