O verbo chegar como auxiliar no português brasileiro

Abstract

From Squartini´s work (1998) about some Romance Periphrases, this paper wants to discuss the behavior of the chegar (to arrive) followed for an infinitive verb and, in the majority of cases, the preposition a (to) in Brazilian Portuguese. The hypothesis is that chegar, in this syntactic context, is an aspectual auxiliary when is an auxiliary in the periphrases. We analyze, from Brazilian Portuguese examples, the aspectual interpretation that we can infer of them. From some characterizations given to auxiliaries verbs in the literature, we show tests to check if is possible to say that, in these contexts, chegar is similar to a real auxiliary verb or if it still keeps the full verb properties.