When we focus on the pure skeletal structures of verbs, the predominant observation is interlanguage similarity. However, if we focus on individual verb cognates between related languages we find many cases of mismatch: verbs with the same phonological label are often used in different syntactic structures in these languages. The only explanation for these mismatches has to come from the syntactically contextualized reading of the root: speakers of different languages can opt for different readings for the same phonological forms in the same context, and they may also give different phonological labels to the 'same events' in the world. Our aim in this article is to show the lack of perfect isomorphism between syntactic structures and their readings with data of reanalysis of participles, suffixes and prefixes, and choice of different roots in verbal syntactic contexts. What causes the imperfect correspondence between syntax and semantics is the fact that syntactic structure is not determined by extralinguistic knowledge.
Syntax-semantic interface; Basic verb skeletal structures; Historical changes in morpheme segmentation; Italian-Portuguese cognate verbs; The readings of roots according to structures
