A variação do complemento [de+infinitivo]~[o+infinitivo] na história do português

Abstract

This dissertation has a synchronic/diachronic nature and aims at describing and characterising variation of the complement [de+infinitive]~[o+infinitive] in five periods of Portuguese language, i.e., archaic Portuguese, classical Portuguese, 17th' century Portuguese, 18th century Portuguese and modern contemporary Portuguese. By means of data analysis from these five periods, it was possible to identify internal factors of the adjacency/non-adjacency, class of verbs, verbal tense, verbal mode and grammatical person that bear the relationship of infinitive complementation in Portuguese. To accomplish the task, first we started investigating from the present period to the past period, returning afterwards to the present period like Labov (1972c) and making use of the software WordSmith Tools to analyse the data quantitatively. The description of the variable infinitive behaviour and their conditioning factors in each of the analysed synchrony was made. We verified that the phenomenon occurs in all phases of Portuguese language. This phenomenon is more recurrent in archaic phase, which is justified by the high rate of rupturing elements that are presented there. Diachronically we verified that [de+infinitive]~[o+infinitive] is stable, and throughout Portuguese history it is conditioned by a specific structural context, adjacency/nonadjacency, as well as by a certain class of verbs, here labelled as modal transitive verbs. We also observed that the number of regent verbs as well as prepositional infinitive structures decrease throughout time, but they do not disappear.