A construção transitiva no PB: uma abordagem funcional centrada no uso

Abstract

This thesis examines a type of construction belonging to the argument structure construction subclass: the transitive construction. The work assumes that in the transitive construction, form and meaning pairings, there are syntactic-semantic aspects of such construction that cannot be attributed to the other. This way, the instances of the transitive construction are examined, composed by simple clauses formed syntactically of Subject – Verb – Object, arising from speaking and writing modalities, and collected from varied corpora. The research is oriented by the theoretical board of usage-based linguistics which holds the conception that the languages are shaped by the complex interaction of cognitive and functional principles. These develop a basal role in the manifestation of linguistic phenomenon. Thus, the thesis anchors itself fundamentally in the construction grammar model and prototypes model to explain the configuration of the transitive construction. At the light of this board, this work starts from the principle that the discourse manifestation of different instances of construction is directly connected to the conceptualization of the human experience, that is, to the way human beings apprehend the world and speak about it. It is assumed that distinct semantic types of verbs and their participant roles interact with the transitive construction, in a way that such interaction may motivate the emerging of new connotations attributed to the instances. In turn, these instances are linked amongst themselves through polysemy links, which may justify a hierarchic organization of the transitive construction in subschemas and microconstructions. Moreover, domain-general processes are subjacent to the discourse manifestations of the construction in screen and, therefore, are examined in the research. The work has concluded that the transitive construction is highly schematic and productive, as much in terms of types as in tokens, which justifies the high number of verbs licensed by this construction, as well as it attests the proximity and/or distancing amongst the instances are especially motivated by semantic properties. The proposition of investigating how the transitive construction manifests itself in the interactive use of language has by finality to contribute to the description of constructions of Portuguese language.