A construção de estrutura argumental com verbos de cognição no português brasileiro

Abstract

This paper focuses specifically on the construction with cognition verbs, which correspond to one of the subtypes of mental processes verbs, along with the processes of perception, affection and desire (HALLIDAY, 1985; HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004). Mental cognition processes are related to the decision, the consideration or belief, memory and understanding and can be expressed by verbs such as decidir (to decide), considerar (to consider), achar (to think), supor (to assume), crer (to believe), acreditar (to rely on), confiar (to trust) imaginar (to imagine), lembrar (to remember), esquecer (to forget) saber (to know), descobrir (to find), entender (to understand) conhecer (to know) and pensar (to think). The corpus of the research consists of oral and written texts of high school students, drawn from Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998). Our overall objective is to identify the construction of prototypical argument structure of cognition verbs in Portuguese in Brazil. The theoretical approache adopted is the Usage-Based Functional Linguistics, a theoretical and methodological model that absorbs principles, processes and categories members of North-America Functional and Cognitive Linguistics. The results show seventeen verbs used to express fourteen semantic values related to the mental processes of cognition. From the collected data, we proceed to the morphosyntactic and semantic characterization of the complements of these verbs. We have also identified the plot structure construction with cognition verbs in PB and three subschemas derived therefrom, of which one is instantiated in most constructs and configures therefore as the prototypical structure of this type of verb. We also found similarities between our results and those of research undertaken on cognition verbs in Spanish.