Caminhos a trilhar: um estudo sobre os verbos de movimento no português brasileiro

Abstract

This work aims to study motion verbs and its purpose is to analyze the syntacticsemantic and discursive-pragmatic status of the clauses in which they occur. The hypothesis adopted is that the motion verbs constitute a class of heterogeneous verbs, whose subgroups have their own characteristics. The research follows a cognitive-functional approach to language by recognizing the contributions of both functional linguists such as Talmy Givón, Paul Hopper, Sandra Thompson, and cognitive linguists such as Michael Tomasello, George Lakoff, and others. Data were taken from two sources: (i) Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998); (ii) News published in websites. The sentences with motion verbs found in these texts were submitted to the following analyzes: (i) Classification of these verbs, according to the traditional view of transitivity; (ii) Distinction of the semantic types of the verbs according to the Borba’s (1996) proposal; (iii) Identification of the semantic roles of the verbal arguments according to Givón (2001), Andrews (1985) and Cançado (2005); (iv) Analysis of the semantic features present in the verb's meaning according to Talmy (1985); (v) Analysis of the informational status of the nominal arguments of motion verbs by Prince's proposal (1981); (vi) Measurement of the transitivity degree of the clauses according to the proposal of Hopper and Thompson (1980); (vii) Ascertaining the adequacy of the sentences to the constraints of the preferred argument structure; and (viii) Review of the studied parameters favoring a categorization of movement verbs. This research revealed that the verbs studied do not constitute a uniform category, being possible to define subclasses with characteristics similar to each other. The differences between motion verbs occurred in two ways: (i) One group has one parameter and the other does not; (ii) All subclasses have the same parameter with different intensity.