A construção existencial no português

Abstract

In this research, the central thesis is defended that the existential construction is a pairing of form and meaning, a node in the Portuguese linguistic network that anchors the content of the speech act through the insertion of an entity in the enunciative plan. The main objective is to describe and analyze the features of this construction sanctioned by the schema [(Exis) (SN) (loc-temp.)] and instantiated with the verbs to haver, to ter and to existir. It is based on the constructional perspective of grammar, in terms of Bybee (2010), Croft (2001), Fillmore (1977, 1995, 2006), Goldberg (1995, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2019), Hudson (2007), Langacker (1987, 1991, 2000), Tomasello (2003) and Traugott and Trousdale (2013). It was used corpora of oral language and written language of Portuguese selected with pre-established criteria that contemplate the Brazilian, African and European variants. Data were derived from the Corpus of Portuguese, Corpus Fala Goiana, Corpus Discurso e Grammática, Corpus of Reference of Contemporary Portuguese. In addition, bibliographical typological research was carried out on data from various languages, indigenous and non-indigenous, romantic and non-Romanesque. It investigates the symbolic link of grammatical and discursive properties, the fusion between lexical and constructional meaning, the levels of schematicity and their idiosyncrasies. It is assumed that the existential construction is a scheme that provides subschemas with special discursive-textual properties. It is verified the full sanction of the matrix scheme, the entity insertion subscheme and the time anchoring subscheme in empirically attested constructs in textual types with communicative purposes, such as thematizing, arguing and contextualizing narrated actions.