Uma análise sintático-semântica dos verbos transitivos indiretos do português brasileiro

Abstract

We took as object of study the indirect transitive verbs (ITV) of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), assuming that they are biargumental verbs that require an oblique complement prepositioned in the immediate position after the verb. These are verbs such as cuidar (de), bater (em) e abdicar (de). The relevance of this work is based on the gaps left in the linguistic literature about the semantic-syntactic status of these verbs. Following the research line of Lexical Semantics, our main objective was to propose an analysis of the ITV followed by their grouping into verbal classes, according to their shared syntactic and semantic properties. We have hypothesized that the ITV would not be grouped into a single canonical verbal class and this hypothesis was confirmed, since these verbs have heterogeneous behaviors, being diversified from each other. Our methodology was based on two main steps: collecting and applying syntactic and semantic tests on the verbs of our analysis. We found data demonstrating that, contrary to what is usually postulated in grammatical and linguistic studies, several ITV are capable of passivization. Thus, we have assumed the position of detaching the passive from the type of transitivity construction in question, whether it is a transitive-direct or a transitive-indirect construction. On this basis, we proposed that passivization does not have a univocal relationship with transitivity. We worked with two groups of verbs: the ITV with visible preposition to the syntactic component, which blocks the formation of passives, and the ITV with invisible preposition to the syntactic component, which admits passivization. For ITV with visible preposition to the syntax were proposed their own classes, exclusively transitive-indirect. As for ITV with invisible preposition to syntax, we observe that they have a behavior very similar to transitive-direct verbs (TDV). They were thus grouped into already proposed classes that contain TDV, as well as classes that we hypothesized may also contain VTD, being considered less prototypical items of these classes.