The construction of argument structure with perception verbs in brazilian portuguese
Usage-based Functional Linguistics; Argument structure construction;
Perception verbs.
On this dissertation, we investigate the transitive argument structure construction with
perception verbs in Brazilian Portuguese in order to: (i) analyze morphological, syntactic
and semantic characteristics of the arguments of the perception verbs in Brazilian
Portuguese; (ii) point the variation of the patterns of argument structure that encode events
of perception; (iii) identify the most frequent semantic-structural pattern of the transitive
construction with perception verbs; and (iv) discuss discursive-pragmatic and cognitive
aspects that motivate the occurrences with these verbs. For that, the study is based on
theoretical-methodological assumptions of Usage-based Functional Linguistics (Furtado da
Cunha; Bispo; Silva, 2013; Rosário; Oliveira, 2016), with a constructionist view (Goldberg,
1995; Bybee, 2016; Traugott and Trousdale, 2021). This research is descriptive and
interpretative, and it is performed through bibliographical procedures and it is based on the
deductive and inductive method. Methodologically, the analysis evaluates the qualitative
and quantitative treatment of the selected data (Cunha Lacerda, 2016). The empirical
material is formed by samples from blogs available on the internet from the year of 2014
with a total of three hundred thousand words. Regarding the subject argument of the
perception verbs, the results indicate that pronouns are the most frequent morphological
configuration whereas, in syntactic terms, it was verified, in greater numbers, the
anaphorical subject recovered from the discursive context; as for semantic properties, the
agent subject has the highest frequency. Concerning the direct object argument, it also
presents different morphosyntactic configurations, assuming the form of NP, sentence or
not being morphologically explicited. Finally, discursive-pragmatic aspects such as
topicality and informational status of the arguments; and cognitive aspects like
categorization and prototypicality motivate the choice of the pattern of argument structure
in which these verbs are used in real uses of the language.