Incoordinate mas sentences in European Portuguese

In this paper, we explore incoordinate sentences with mas (‘but’, in English) in European Portuguese (EP). These sentences are characterized by the presence of a conjunction attached to a single sentence, occurring in the position of a second conjunct. We take up on the work of Giorgi (2016, 2018), Kuteva et al (2017) and Niclot (2018), and propose a syntactic analysis for incoordinate sentences. Our data shows that, in EP, there are two types of incoordinate sentences, depending on their independence, i.e., incoordination stage. In both cases, mas is a conjunction and not a discourse marker, which heads a ConjP. But, to capture its correlation with discourse, it should be connected with a discourse configuration as the one suggested by Cinque (2008) and Giorgi (2016, 2018). Thus, with this investigation we aim at providing a more adequate description of paratactic constructions, the levels of integration that can be associated to coordinate/incoordinate sentences in European Portuguese, and the status of conjunctions that occur in them.