Luana  Lopes Amaral
Research  |  2020-21

Brazil

Project Title: Creation in the Semantics of Verbs and Constructions

Host Department: UNM Linguistics, Faculty Associate: Dr. William Croft

Luana Lopes Amaral is a professor at the Faculty of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in Brazil. She works teaching and researching Portuguese language and linguistics. Her research is mainly focused on verbal semantics and construction grammar, specifically verb classes and argument structure constructions, taking Brazilian Portuguese as an object language. For the past years, she has been working, together with colleagues at UFMG, on a lexical-semantic database for the classification and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese verbal lexicon (www.letras.ufmg.br/verboweb).

As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of New Mexico, Professor Amaral developed her research on verbal semantics and argument structure constructions, analyzing specifically the group of verbs known as ‘verbs of creation’ in Brazilian Portuguese. In this project, she studied a specific meaning component of verbal semantics (creation), and investigated how this meaning component is represented in the semantics of specific verbs and how it is related to linguistic generalizations. The analysis of creation in this project followed the representational model and the theory of argument structure proposed and developed by Professor William Croft, from the UNM Department of Linguistics, who hosted the visit. Professor Croft’s project at the time investigated verbal semantics and argument structure constructions in English, and had the goal to integrate semantic representations of events into VerbNet (a lexical-semantic database for the classification and analysis of the English verbal lexicon).