Abstract We investigate a Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) structure composed of an expressive item (EI), such as [essa droga de DP]; schematically [DP EI of DP]. The EI ‘droga’ in ‘Eu arrumei essa droga de carro’ (“I fixed this damn car”) does not usually have ‘carro’ (“car”) as its argument, but the whole sentence and expresses an attitude of the speaker towards the content of the proposition – s/he is not happy with the fact that s/he had to fix the car or that it broke. We claim that the EI in this structure can have scope only over the constituent in which it appears or over a CP or DP which occurs above it, based on Gutzmann’s (2015, 2019) theoretical framework.