Estudo comparativo sobre o uso de construções aspectuais inceptivas no português brasileiro e no português europeu

Abstract

This paper presents, in a comparative perspective, the usage of inceptive aspectualconstructions (CIs) in Brazilian Portuguese (PB) and European Portuguese (PE). Thisresearch was based on a hypothesis suggested by Coelho (2014), about a possible variationwhich would be occurring between PE and PB concerning the manifestation of inceptiveaspect, type of aspect which indicates the beginning of verbal situations. Beyond thishypothesis, two other hypothesis were elaborated, considering the methodological criteriaadopted in order to accomplish the objectives of this research: one hypothesis is related to theexistence of inceptive constructions beyond the periphrastic ones, and the other refers to theoral and the written speech of Portuguese, which could influence on the aspectual marking.The compiled corpora belong to the oral and the written speech of PE and PB, from the 19thto the 21st century. The oral samples were compound by theater plays, sociolinguisticinterviews and spontaneous speech transcriptions; the written samples were built throughnovels. The assumptions of sociolinguistic variation (LABOV; WEINREICH, HERZOG,2006 [1968]; LABOV, 2008 [1972]), of Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006;CROFT, 2007), and of studies about aspect in general (VENDLER, 1968; COMRIE, 1976)and in Portuguese (CASTILHO, 1968; TRAVAGLIA, 1985; COSTA, 1990; BARROSO,1994) were chosen as theoretical basis to the analysis. Before beginning the analysis, thehypothesis about the existence of inceptive constructions different from the periphrastic oneswas partially refuted, because the constructions which appeared in the corpora were diverse,many of them non-aspectual, and others ambiguous; on the other side, it was decided that theinchoative verbs were removed from the list of inceptive constructions, because they indicatea change of state without a focus on the beginning of the change. These procedures restrictedthe analysis only to the periphrastic constructions. The results pointed a diatopic variationbetween PB and PE, concerning only the usage of non-canonic CIs, which auxiliary verbs donot have the idea of beginning in their semantems, but they mark the inceptive and other typesof aspect (such as iterative and durative) through metaphorical abstractions of movement(SIGILIANO, 2013). The diatopic variation, which was stronger in the written speech, seemsto be linked to the diamesic variation (orality x writing), due to the differences of textestablishing in each language modality (including the temporal and aspectual usages). Thisdiamesic variation, on its turn, seems to be conditioned by many linguistic and cognitivefactors, such as the lexical variation, the lexicalization, the chunking and the restriction oftraces imposed by the CI, beyond the diaphasic variation, since the individual style influencesthe aspectual marking, especially in the written speech, which is off-line. However, even withthese factors, the CIs used in PE and in PB considering their morphosyntactic and semanticconstitution were not different enough to distinguish patterns of ICs in each variety oflanguage.