O controle de traços semântico-pragmáticos sobre possessivos no português

Abstract

The possessives are considered as a category of words that establishes a possession relationship between a possessing being and a possessed element. However, only in a broad sense can the possession relationship be considered as its function, since the possessives can assume other relations. The objective of this study is to relate semantic-pragmatic traits with the use of pre-nominal possessives based on a cognitive-functional perspective. We adopted the metaphorical categories presented in Heine et al. (1991), ranging from the strongest level of concreteness to the strongest level of abstraction, organized along a metaphorical scale of person> object> activity> space> time> quality. We used a speech sample taken from the Falares Sergipanos database, from which we extracted 1267 occurrences of pre-nominal possessives. The data shows that the control of semantic-pragmatic traits is productive for describing the functioning of possessives in Portuguese, with a predominance of the most concrete category, person, and the most abstract one, quality; the smallest numbers are found in the category time. The occurrence of possessives seems to be interconnected with the person who produces the statement, with the speaker, since the greatest occurrences are in categories more related to the trait of [+person].