A construção estativa com o verbo ser no português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis audits stative constructions using to be verb. So far, much of the available material and already undertaken and consulted research emphasizes, above all, the analysis of the grammaticalization process of this verb and classifies it, only from morphosyntactic viewpoint, as the most generally representative of the linking verbs or as an auxiliary verb, semantically faded and of procedural value. However, occurrences of this verb reveal a variation process in its uses. Accordingly, we seek to evaluate constructive patterns instantiated by this verb present-day, considering its semantic multiplicity, cognitive and interactional aspects involved, as well as the lexicon-grammar gradient. The proposed inquiry has qualitative and quantitative traits and is set under Usage-based Functional Linguistics, which gathers the North-American functionalist praxis, represented by researchers such as Talmy Givón, Paul Hopper, Joan Bybee, Elizabeth Closs-Traugott, and Cognitive Linguistics, notably the approach linked to the Construction Grammar, as postulated by Adele Goldberg, William Croft, Jan-Olla Östman, among others. The data comes from real life documents taken from Corpus Discurso & Gramática - Corpus D&G (VOTRE; OLIVEIRA, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998; FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), in its written form, from the Banco Conversacional de Natal – BCN (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 2011) and songs collected on the internet. The obtained results indicate that the constructive patterns of verb to be show a semantic slip that goes, in a continuum, from full verb to linking and auxiliary verb, with occurrences in constructions from partially specified and flexible to the most idiosyncratic. Therefore, the relevance of the interface between formal and functional aspects in the analysis of linguistic uses is ratified.