Os verbos de transferência do Português Brasileiro: uma proposta de classificação de Interface Sintaxe-Semântica Lexical

Abstract

This study investigated transfer verbs of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) such as dar (‘give’), enviar (‘send’) and lançar (‘throw’). Those verbs denote causative events in which one object is transferred to a goal and they typically occur in ditransitive structures. Our objective was to investigate the syntactic-semantic behavior of this verbal group, as to verify if they could be considered a BP verbal class (CANÇADO; AMARAL, 2016; LEVIN, 1993, 2009, 2010). We started from the hypothesis that it would be possible to group them in a single class, since the literature suggests that they share the same event structure. The verbs were gathered from Borba's (1990) dictionary and classified by shared semantic and syntactic properties. As a result, 34 transfer verbs were distributed in three main subclasses: subclass of change of place via trajectory (13 verbs), subclass of caused motion by direct transmission of force (7 verbs) and subclass of change of possession via contract (21 verbs). We concluded that the transfer verbs of Brazilian Portuguese constitute a single class (medium-grained level), since they share the same event structure and several syntactic-semantic properties. Also, it is possible to group them in three subclasses (fine-grained level) defined by shared syntactic-semantic properties related to the individual meaning of each verb.