A construção modal ‘vai que’ no português brasileiro

This paper discusses the modal construction ‘vai que’ from Brazilian Portuguese. Our goal is to analyze its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. This construction is used when the speaker wants to convey that something is possible, thus, it is a modal construction. Our analysis follows proposals from cartographic syntax (Cinque, 1999; Tsai, 2015; Rizzi; Bocci, 2017), formal semantics (Kratzer, 1991; von Fintel, 2006; Hacquard, 2006, 2010, 2011) and formal pragmatics (Stalnaker, 1999; Portner, 2004). Previous analyses of ‘vai que’ have argued that it is: (i) weak; (ii) epistemic; (iii) conditional like; (iv) counterfactual; (v) high in the hierarchy; and (vi) a directive speech act (see Andrade, 2012, 2014, 2019; Dearmas, 2022, 2024; Ely and Cezário, 2023a, 2023b). We agree that it is a weak epistemic modal based on paraphrasis and contradiction tests (von Fintel; Heim, 2011), but we argue that ‘vai que’ is not part of a conditional structure, it does not convey counterfactuality, it is not higher than the epistemic modal head in the functional hierarchy, and it is also not a directive speech act. In our analysis, ‘vai que’ accesses the speaker’s beliefs through the speech event, following Hacquard (2006, 2010), and it presupposes another proposition in the common ground working as a justification for it.Keywords: ‘Vai que’. Modality. Speech act. Formal semantics. Cartographic syntax.