摘要：This paper is about the semantics and the syntax of aspectual verbs in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Some of these verbs select a+Infinitive in the European variety whereas the same verbs select that structure and Gerund in the Brazilian variety. We show that this discrepancy can be explained in semantic and syntactic grounds due to the different nature of the semantic ‘input’ (stative or eventive), the availability of tense constructions and the functional structure of the embedded domain. Another group of aspectual verbs do not differ in their syntactic structure in the two varieties as their structure (de+Infinitive) is the same, although syntactically different from a+ Infinitive, but they do differ in their semantics and also in the selection of different verbs.
