Constituição e funcionalidade de construções-suporte prototípicas no português brasileiro

Abstract

The general objective of this thesis is to analyze and describe the constructional properties of the support-verb construction in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), aiming to contribute to a better understanding of this construction from the perspective of Construction Grammar (CxG). The analyses presented here are primarily based on studies of Construction Grammar (Croft, 2001; Langacker, 2008; Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013), in addition to being anchored in theoretical assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics (Langacker, 1987; Lakoff, 1990; Bybee, 2010) and conceptions of Functional Linguistics (Martelotta, 2011; Neves, 2011; Castilho, 2018; Casseb-Galvão, 2023). The methodology adopted consisted of qualitative and quantitative analyses. In our research, we employed data from the Corpus do Português; this database comprises approximately 2 billion words, encompassing the Brazilian, European, and African varieties of Portuguese. The platform is divided into three sections: Genre/Historical, Web/Dialects, and NOW. For this study, the Web/Dialects collection was utilized, which comprises 1 billion Portuguese words from various countries. This choice enabled more precise searches, such as dialect-specific queries, allowing, for example, the exclusive analysis of Brazilian Portuguese. For the analysis and description of the occurrences of the support-verb construction, the inductive method was used. This method is characterized by moving from specific observations to reach broader conclusions and premises about the phenomenon. This meant that the observation of the occurrences in the corpus allowed us to formulate generalizations regarding the properties of the support-verb construction. The study starts from the definition of Support-Verb Construction as a predicative constructional pattern with two open slots. At the formal level, this construction exhibits a prototypical morphosyntactic configuration composed of a Support Verb and a Noun Phrase (NP). At the semantic level, it can represent types of states of affairs such as Events and Situations. This form-meaning pairing establishes a construction within the linguistic network configured as a predicate subschema, as it features properties such as the opening of argument slots and the coding of grammatical categories like tense, mood, and agreement. Some hypotheses were raised in this research. Firstly, it is postulated that a restricted number of desemanticized verbs exhibit greater productivity when integrating the support-verb construction. In structural terms, it is proposed that this construction allows for morphosyntactic configurations with varying degrees of prototypicality. Regarding meaning, we postulate that the support-verb construction is partially compositional in nature and describes States of Affairs categorized as actions, states, or processes. Furthermore, the support-verb construction would operate in a specific manner within the subsystems of transitivity and voice. The research results demonstrate that this construction is productive in Brazilian Portuguese. Frequency analysis revealed that the most productive verbs for this constructional pattern are the verbs give, do/make, and have. The analysis of the schematicity of the support-verb construction, in turn, demonstrated that this construction can present different morphosyntactic configurations: the prototypical constructional pattern (support verb and noun phrase) and non-prototypical constructional patterns. Regarding the meaning of the construction, the results demonstrated that compositionality is a property that manifests in degrees within the use of the support-verb construction. In more compositional contexts, the sum of the meanings of all elements integrating the construction contributes to the formation of its overall sense. To a large extent, the support verb contributes to the representation of meaning; however, the noun phrase plays a more prominent role in the semantic encoding of the construction. In certain contexts of low compositionality, the meaning of the noun phrase does not exhibit a fully transparent correspondence with the encoded state of affairs; consequently, the construction is less analyzable and less compositional. In such cases, the meaning is encoded by the construction as a whole and cannot be easily derived from the sum of its constituents. The results obtained in this thesis can serve as a foundation for future research, especially regarding the constructional properties of the support-verb construction and its network integration. The aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of constructional studies of the predicate category in Brazilian Portuguese, providing a basis for future academic research and, consequently, contributing to the improvement of grammar teaching in our country.