A construção com verbos de percepção: uma análise baseada no uso

Abstract

On this dissertation, we focus on the transitive argument structure construction with perception verbs such as see, hear, try, feel, notice, among others in order to investigate semantic-syntactic, discursive-pragmatic and cognitive properties of this construction in language use in Brazilian Portuguese. We postulate that the patterns of argument structure that encode events of perception are subschemas of the prototypical transitive construction. For that, the study is based on theoreticalmethodological assumptions of Usage-based Functional Linguistics (Furtado da Cunha; Bispo; Silva, 2013; Rosário; Oliveira, 2016), with a constructionist view (Goldberg, 1995; Bybee, 2016; Traugott and Trousdale, 2021). This research is descriptive and interpretative, and it is performed through bibliographical procedures, and it is based on the deductive and inductive method. Methodologically, the analysis evaluates the qualitative and quantitative treatment of the selected data (Cunha Lacerda, 2016). The empirical material is formed by samples from blogs available on the internet from the year of 2014 with a total of three hundred thousand words. Regarding the subject argument of the perception verbs, the results indicate that this element is not lexicalized in most of the data; as for semantic properties, the agent subject has the highest frequency. Concerning the direct object argument, it also presents different morphosyntactic configurations, assuming the form of NP, sentence or not being lexically performed. In that respect, the transitive construction with perception verbs can be represented as [NP V NP]  [SUBJECTAGENT – PERCEPTION VERB – DIRECT OBJECTTHEME] or [SUBJECTEXPERIENCER – PERCEPTION VERB – DIRECT OBJECTPHENOMENON], in fewer numbers. Finally, discursive-pragmatic aspects, such as topicality and informational status of the arguments, and cognitive aspects like categorization and prototypicality, motivate the choice of the pattern of argument structure in which these verbs are used.