Alternância de transitividade com verbos agentivos em pb: a louça já lavou, a casa já vendeu, o caminhão já carregou

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze intransitive sentences of the type a louça já lavou/ o imóvel já vendeu/ o caminhão já carregou, called “peripheral inchoatives”, in Brazilian Portuguese. In a comparison with canonical inchoatives, of the type os vidros quebraram/ a porta estragou/ a meia rasgou, resulting from the causative-inchoative alternation, it was shown that both types of intransitive sentences, although syntactically similar, result from different verbal alternation processes. Still, in an analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese verbs that form peripheral inchoatives, it was found that there are four types of constraints for that alternation. The verbs must be agentive and transitive, the sentential context must include elements such as modifiers, negation or question prosody, and the sentence must contain specific arguments. Besides, the verbs must be able to, in the appropriate context, generate the following implicatures: the action is being carried out by an agent or by an instrument, different from the speaker him/herself, and the speaker does not witness the action, but knows the expected result and says something about it. It was also found that the analyzed intransitive sentences focus on the lexicalized result of the action (in the case of result verbs, such as vender and carregar) and generates a result implicature, also focused, in the case of verbs that do not lexicalize results (such as lavar).