Uma análise sintático-semântica dos verbos de petição em PB

Abstract

This dissertation presents a syntactic-semantic analysis of verbs of petition in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), within the theoretical framework of verbal valency, in conjunction with lexical semantics. It starts from the observation that certain verbs traditionally classified as verbs of expression — such as pedir (to ask), rogar (to beg), implorer (to implore), interceder (to intercede), and clamar (to call out) — exhibit specific argumental and semantic properties, notably the recurrent selection of two prepositional complements and the coding of a directive content associated with a request or plea. Based on this regularity, we propose the delimitation of a separate class, called verbs of petition. The theoretical framework articulates contributions from the grammatical description of Brazilian Portuguese, especially in Borba (1996) and Cançado (2010, 2016), with contributions from lexical semantics and verbal typology, in dialogue with works by Beth Levin (1993, 1998), Malka Rappaport Hovav (1998, 2005), Dieter Wunderlich (2012), and Schwarze (2001). The discussion of the lexical aspect takes as a reference the classification proposed by Zeno Vendler (1967), as reworked in contemporary literature and applied to BP by Cançado, avoiding direct identification between aspectual class, event structure, and semantic content. The research aims to catalog verbs of petition, analyze their argument structure, determine the syntactic-semantic status of their complements—distinguishing arguments from adjuncts—and describe the thematic roles involved, without reducing them to traditional syntactic functions. The methodology is qualitative and descriptive, bibliographic in nature, supported by attested data extracted from specialized dictionaries and databases such as VerboWeb. The analysis is based on the application of linguistic tests consolidated in the literature, such as tests of argumental obligatoriness, complement omission, diathesis alternations, passivization, and aspectual diagnoses based on the behavior of the progressive and perfective. The results support the hypothesis that petition verbs constitute a semantically motivated and syntactically coherent class in BP, distinguishing themselves from other verbs of expression by their semantic content of request and their characteristic argument configuration. The dissertation thus contributes to the refinement of the description of Brazilian Portuguese verb classes and to the development of valency theory applied to data from this language, with implications for grammar teaching and applied linguistic analysis.