Os verbos de resultado eventivo no Português Brasileiro: discussões sobre a Complementaridade Maneira/Resultado

Abstract

Lexical Semantics proposes that verbs can be grouped into semantically and syntactically uniform classes. This study focuses on Brazilian Portuguese (BP) verbs, including 'murder verbs' such as "assassinar" 'murder' and "executar" 'execute', as well as verbs that do not specifically entail the meaning of murder but behave similarly, such as "combater" 'combat' and "demolir" 'demolish'. Unlike the class of change-of-state verbs, such as "quebrar" 'break', these verbs have been understudied in the literature. In English, 'murder verbs' are considered problematic because they challenge a broad lexicalization constraint: the Manner/Result Complementarity. This constraint dictates that a single verb cannot encode both manner and result components in its meaning, as these are in complementary distribution in verb lexicalization, which impacts their syntax. For example, "quebrar" ‘break’, a result verb, has a stative result meaning, "quebrado" ‘broken’; while "correr" 'run', a manner verb, has an eventive manner meaning, "corrida" ‘runN’. In terms of predicate decomposition, there would be, respectively, the STATE and MANNER roots, which also cannot co-occur. However, Ausensi (2019) posits for English that murder verbs lexicalize both a manner of killing and a result state. In BP, these verbs, along with others that do not specifically encode the meaning of murder, have not been properly analyzed. This leads us to question: what meaning do these verbs lexicalize? We hypothesize that they lexicalize an eventive, not stative, result, forming a specific verbal class. Our goal is to propose an analysis of these verbs, followed by their grouping into verbal class(es), with a predicate decomposition structure that reveals their semantics. Our methodology involved collecting these verbs and applying syntactic and semantic tests. We have concluded that these verbs exhibit distinctive behavior, forming a verbal class, as we hypothesized. These verbs display properties that have been associated with both the result and manner components: their bieventive nature and the presence of a result in their meaning associate them with result verbs, while their eventive root associates them with manner verbs. We observed that, unlike "quebrar" ‘break’, these verbs produce a result that is not stative (‘become state’), concluding that they are verbs of change, but not of change-of-state. Confirming our hypothesis, these verbs express an eventive result. In "O ladrão assassinou a vítima" 'The thief murdered the victim', there is an action that causes an eventive result, the murder of the victim, not the victim *becoming murdered. Our proposal contrasts with Ausensi (2019), as our tests showed that the analyzed verbs do not have manner in their meaning, despite being eventive. Moreover, our proposal challenges Complementarity, as manner is associated with an event, and result is associated with a state in the literature. However, Complementarity is based on the principle that there are only two types of verbs in the lexicon: manner (eventive) and result (stative). Nevertheless, we demonstrate that another verbal class can be identified: that of eventive result verbs. Thus, our verbs do not oppose Complementarity but rather refine it, dissociating 'result' from 'state' and 'manner' from 'event.' The characteristics of the verbs under analysis suggest that they have their own event structure, which includes neither MANNER nor STATE.