“Ficar a + infinitivo” no português europeu

"Ficar a + infinitive" is a construction that focuses on the ‘beginning’ of the situation denoted by the predicate whose core is the infinitive form of the verb. This value, “inceptive”, is expressed by a considerable set of other constructions, of which comecar a, romper a, meter-se a + infinitive are just examples. Therefore, it is a central objective of this article to investigate the idiosyncrasies of the construction under analysis. To this end, and almost always using a corpus made up of authentic linguistic material, collected in the written press and in literary texts (late 20th century and early 21st century), – I (will) call forth several arguments, both structurally and syntactic-semantic nature.