Análise das construções com verbo suporte botar: propriedades gramaticais e discursivas

Abstract

This work aims to provide some formal, semantic and pragmatic characterization of the support verb “botar”, since the wideness concerning this verb presents distinctive syntactical and semantical behaviors in its structure. From the characteristics of the syntactical and semantical constructions of the verb, three degrees of categorical flushness were explored: free constructions, prototypical constructions and structures which are nearly crystalize. The research was concentrated in the constructions “botar+SN/SP” in Brazilian Portuguese, establishing the morpho-syntactical and semantical which the verb “botar” assumes when it is constructed as a support verb. The rigorous investigation of the selection properties of “botar” and its syntactical and semantical behavior in the “botar+SN/SP” structure provided support to describe different employments of the verb, hence leading to a chain of grammatical structures. The linguistic theoretical base used is the functionalism theory of language, which allows to precisely separating ordinary verbs from the support verbs, by treating their aspects in a scalar, rather discrete perspective. The corpus used in the analysis consists of Vsup occurrences in formal and informal Brazilian Portuguese language, however without restricting to only the differences among these modalities, but also using the hypothesis that the CVSup complexity could not be represented in these language modalities. The research allowed to create a systematic syntactical and semantical of expression involving the support verb which present degrees of categorical flushness. In order to achieve that, multiple analyses were conducted in which the syntactical and semantical descriptions of the expressions, in addition to the use of parameters which influences the flushness and the comprehension. As a result of the research, the productivity of the verb is more evident in the popular rather than in the formal usage. In particular, in formal Portuguese of Fortaleza, we verified a lower frequency of use, which confirms our starting hypothesis that the grammaticalization is slower in the formal language, although we could note that it has started already. After detailed analyses in the XVIII, XIX and XX centuries, we concluded that the usage of the verb has been increasing in the past few centuries, in fact the verb is having a gradual continuous grammaticalization. According to the analysis parameters and the examples obtained from the corpus, the description of each of those levels showed that the verb “botar”, within the support verb category, can be part of both the less and more integrated structures, depending on the how close those constructions are from the prototype of a support verb construction.