Uma análise semântica para verbos aspectuais em português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis investigates the semantic contribution of the following aspectual verbs: começar ‘begin’, continuar ‘continue’, deixar ‘quit’, parar ‘stop’, passar ‘pass’, voltar ‘resume’, and acabar/terminar ‘finish’, in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP). The main goal is to contribute to the discussion about aspect and aspectual verbs in BrP and in natural languages in general, within a Formal Semantics approach. This work treats aspectual verbs as eventuality modifiers, and, consequently, it defends that they contribute to express lexical aspect (Aktionsart) – or situation aspect (Smith 1997) – in accordance with previous works such as Oliveira et al. (2001) and Laca (2002; 2004; 2005). This thesis also proposes that the verbs under discussion behave differently from verbs which contribute to express grammatical aspect – or viewpoint aspect (Smith 1997) – such as estar ‘be’, in the progressive aspect, and ir ‘go’, in the prospective aspect, also assuming that they have different positions in the syntactic structure. Since aspectual verbs are related to lexical aspect, the present research also analyzes lexical aspect features in the predicate which is selected for these verbs. Relevant features for this selection are located in the verbal phrase level (VP) and are given compositionally. Thus, phrases such as the direct object are able to change them, allowing (or not) that an aspectual verb select this VP. This work defends the hypothesis that each aspectual verb selects their complements based on specific features found in the VP, and that these features are linked to the semantics of this aspectual verb. Then, this research defends the idea that the selection constraints of each aspectual verb can be observed in its lexical entry, which explains the selection made by these verbs. Furthermore, we defend the idea that we can verify differences between semantically similar verbs like começar and passar, in their periphrastic construction, from differences found in their lexical entries.