Brazilian and European Portuguese connective que-clauses

This paper examines the properties of Brazilian and European Portuguese que-clauses as in Vamos comer, que eu estou com fome ‘Let’s eat, because I’m hungry’. These clauses are generally characterized as explicative causal clauses due to their frequent justification value. However, other readings can be associated to que-clauses, such as a result reading in Compre os ovos que eu faço o bolo de banana ‘Buy the eggs, then I will make the banana cake’. We argue that these different readings are contextually derived rather than encoded in the meaning of the connector que, which we take to be semantically bleached. Extending previous analyses of explicative causal clauses in European Portuguese to these additional cases, we show that, despite their different readings, que-clauses are best analyzed as parenthetical CPs. This analysis is supported by their positional flexibility, prosodic autonomy, lack of contribution to the host clause’s propositional content, and syntactic opacity. To account for their parenthetical status, we adopt a syntactic approach to parentheticals along the lines of de Vries (2007, 2012).