Construções de elevação com adjetivos e a preposição <i>de</i>

Abstract This paper focuses on Portuguese adjetival constructions akin to English contructions with tough -movement — e.g., este problema é difícil de resolver ‘this problem is tough to solve’. In standard European and Brazilian Portuguese, the infinitival clause tipically contains a transitive verb, and no explicit external argument. However, some other — poorly studied, and arguably non-canonical — variants of these constructions occur in corpora of newspaper writing of both European and Brazilian Portuguese. These will be the focus of this paper. Three variants will be assessed: constructions with explicit external arguments; constructions with clear subject raising (of external arguments, or internal arguments of unaccusative verbs); (non- tough -)constructions with unmotivated insertion of the preposition de ‘to’. All in all, it is possible to conclude that Portuguese adjectival constructions with tough -movement are prone to substantial language variation and are occasionally affected by linguistic anomaly, even in relatively formal written registers.