A auxiliaridade do verbo chegar em português brasileiro

Abstract

This work approaches the verb chegar when it is followed by the preposition a and the infinitive form in Brazilian Portuguese. In the literature, there is no consensus about the treatment of the verb in this periphrasis. While some authors consider it an auxiliary verb, others do not. Our research resumed this discussion and showed that chegar, in the context above, confirms all the criteria indicated as indicators of auxiliarity. After that, we noticed that the values of tense, modality, voice and aspect are given to the auxiliaries. Then, we investigated, one by one, all the possibilities. The values of tense and voice were easily rejected. After this, we searched, in a general description of modality, a clue to conduct us deeper in the research. We did not found one and then we rejected this possibility too. The analysis about chegar as an aspectual auxiliary took more time and space in this work, because there are some authors who argues for this kind of analysis. First, we tried to characterize the grammatical aspect and observe whether the sentences could mean the aspectual categories included there. We concluded that they could not. Later, we analyzed the possibility of chegar to restrict some actional class. Again, the conclusions were negative. Bearing in mind the behavior of the periphrasis in the different contexts, we affirm that it was not possible to accept an aspectual value to chegar. At the end, we propose an analysis to this verb that takes into consideration not only the syntactic and semantic aspects, but also the pragmatic one: we show that when the speaker uses the auxiliary chegar, this speaker wishes to point to a scale, more specifically to its strongest argumentative point. In this way, we might have an auxiliary verb which is not temporal, modal or aspectual, but essentially pragmatic. The corpus of this research is composed of sentences from Brazilian Portuguese, spoken and written, and other sentences created to verify the compatibility of chegar in specific contexts.