Valência dos verbos de derramamento em português

Abstract

This research, essentially based on Perini (2008), sought after to describe the valence of verbs pour, spill, leak, drip, leak and spill from Portuguese language, which are called spilling verbs. This is about a description work and systematization of data, which are described in the formal structures and semantics of the constructions in which verbs spill occur, in order to identify their diathesis and so its valence. This study is important as it allows the grammatical behavior of verbs, contributing to the development of linguistic theories empirically validated. For this, we need to define key terms: construction, diathesis and valence. Thus, it was said that construction are the structures that relate information of a syntax and semantics, that is symbolic; diathesis are constructions that are able of subclass verbs of the language and the valence of a word corresponds to the set of diatheses in which this can occur. Since those terms were defined, we review some works on the studied subject and found that, when dealing with the verbal valence, grammarians and writers dictionaries that were studied had very limited conclusions about this subject. On the other hand, the linguists, in spite of having contributed to the study of the valences, all of them differ in some way from the scope of this work. Since the target of our research is essentially descriptive, its methodology is based on survey and analysis of data from a large corpus of oral and written Portuguese language, which consists of dictionaries, magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs, discussion forums and spontaneous language data, and introspection data, fruit of the intuition of the speakers who researches their own language. In order to analyze these data, we need to resort to the notion of thematic roles, what is essential in the semantic description of the constructions. We have seen that the definition and identification is not yet a consensus among linguists, however, we tried to define those who were present at the construction of the spilling verbs. We also needed to work with the semantic definition of spilling verbs, what justifies the fact of them belong to the same group. Thus, we said that the pouring verbs are those that, although polysemic in at least one occurrence of Portuguese, have simultaneously the following characteristics: 1) The presence of a substance of fluid character; 2) Displacement; 3) Change of shape. Proceeding to the data analysis, we have got a total of twelve diathesis that make up the valence of spilling verbs, five of them were considered prototypical, because they occur with all the six spilling verbs in its meaning. In addition, it was also detected in some diathesis, the use of an expression that encodes the Source to refer to, in fact, a Theme, in that case, the use of metonymic source in the subject. At the end, it was also possible to reflect on the Levin (1993) hypothesis that semantically similar verbs tend to have the same valence, concluding that this is not straightforward, however it can not be completely ruled out. We hope that this work bring contributions to the study of verbal valence, enabling the development or review of linguistic theories compatibles with this description.