ON DURATIVE AND DETELICISATION READINGS ASSOCIATED WITH <i>POR X TEMPO</i> ‘FOR X TIME’ IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF SYNTACTIC CARTOGRAPHY^†

Abstract By taking into account the methodological guidelines brought by the Cartographic approach (Cinque 1999; Rizzi 1997), this article aims to propose a Cartographic analysis of the temporal adjunct por x tempo (‘for x time’) in Brazilian Portuguese. It particularly seeks to explore how the two possible readings given by the combination of this adjunct with telic and atelic predicates—as reported in the literature (Basso 2007, Basso &amp; Pires de Oliveira 2010, Basso &amp; Bergamini‐Perez 2016, among others)—can be derived in Syntax. We argue that very simple (Minimalist) ingredients, namely external and internal Merge, coupled with the assumption of Cartographic hierarchies—in this particular case, Cinque's (1999) hierarchy—can account for these two readings in a straightforward way, under a view we call Alternative I (which is confronted with a radical competing analysis, Alternative II, whose sole ingredient is recursive merge). We show the advantages of the Cartographic analysis (Alternative I) in directly mapping out to the interpretive system the two readings made available by the combination of por x tempo (‘for x time’) with different predicates.