Traços polissêmicos do verbo calcular

Abstract

The present work aims to present the semantic features of the verb “to calculate” that, in prototypical context, has the meaning of determinate value or numerical greatness by mathematical reasoning. In real situation of communication, we observe that there’s a significant amount of examples to calculate, sometimes expressing the quantity of something concrete, sometimes quantifying something abstract, or even working as a parenthesis or extra information related to the speaker’s posture on what is said. This behavior reveals the changes of the verb meaning. So, the predicate that selects two concrete arguments, would be turning into a subjectivity and intersubjectivity marker. As a theoretical support, an analysis was based on studies such as Sweetser (1990), Heine et al (1991), Hopper and Traugott (1993), Neves (2000) and Martelotta (2010), which deal with semantic changes in the field of grammaticalization. More specifically, it was taken as base Casseb-Galvão (2000) and Fortilli (2015), for dealing with verbs that pass through similar alterations. For the collection and analysis of data, we selected cases found between the 19th, 20th and 21h centuries, in Corpus do Português. The results point to a greater dissemination of the uses of the verb to calculate in parenthetic configuration, which is justified by the process of abstraction of its meaning, since, when parentethized, the verb to calculate does not refer to specific semantic features and starts to show features that express the non-certainty of the speaker before what is being affirmed.