Posse predicativa no português: construções com 'ter' e 'estar com'

Abstract

In Contemporary Brazilian Portuguese the predicative possession can be expressed through ‘ter’ or ‘estar com’ constructions. In ‘ter’ sentences, the predicate expresses individual-level (IL) properties, i.e., permanent properties. On the other hand, in ‘estar com’ sentences, the predicate expresses stage-level (SL) properties, that is, transitory properties. However, Avelar (2004; 2018; 2019) and Schwenter and Dickinson (2020) claim that in ‘ter’ sentences when combined with temporal adverbial expressions, the individual-level predicate (ILP) is reinterpreted as stage-level predicate (SLP). Based on this fact, this research proposes to analyze predicative possessive constructions in Portuguese with ‘ter’ and ‘estar com’ when they are interpreted as SLP. Taking this into account, this study aims to identify if, in SLP contexts, ‘ter’ and ‘estar com’ constructions have similar meanings or if they are different in meaning. Since there are few studies on predicative possession in Portuguese, this investigation is justified: up to this point there are only Avelar’s (2004; 2018; 2019) and Schwenter and Dickinson’s (2020) work about ‘ter’ and ‘estar com’ as predicative possession in Portuguese. These authors and Heine (1997), Stassen (2009), Kratzer (1989), Manninen (2001), Maienborn (2005), Travaglia (2016), Deo (2009) and others constitute the theoretical frame of this research. Regarding the data and the methodology of this study, we collected 286 ‘ter’ sentences and 290 ‘estar com’ sentences from Corpus do Português (Davies, 2016), cooccurring with the adverbials ‘sempre’, ‘nunca’, ‘hoje’, ‘ainda’, ‘agora’, ‘atualmente’, ‘já’ and ‘essa semana/esse mês/esse ano’ (always, never, today, still, currently, already and this week/month/year, respectively). These data were been analyzed with Python version 3 (Python Software Foundation, 2024), where firstly we applied the Chi-Squared test, which showed that the four variables (immediacy contextual +/- durative; adverb type; type of possessee and possessor-possessee relation) has p-value less than 0,05. Then a Multinomial Regression model was tested which indicated that the variable immediacy in interaction with type of possessee works well to explain whether ‘ter’ or ‘estar com’ is more likely to occur. The results show that when the context is +durative, ‘ter’ is more likely to occur.