Análise da relação entre os aspectos gramatical e lexical sob o prisma de uma teoria composicional

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the lexical aspect based on telicity and to observe whether this property operates independently in relation to the grammatical aspect through an analysis of the representation of time and events in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The main question of this research is to investigate our language ability to describe an event using both the perfective and the imperfective aspect without affecting the telicity of this event when we change its tense in terms of verbal inflection and periphrases. The function of providing information about the point where this event ends, or its telos, belongs to the semantic-lexical properties of the verb and its relationship with its internal argument, since the information regarding the telicity of the event depends on the form in which this relation is established. We start with the analysis of the morphosyntactic realizations of the perfective, imperfective and progressive aspect in Portuguese, using the system developed by Reinhart (1986), which modifies the theory of Reichenbach (1947) in order to describe how time and grammatical aspect are realized in a more precise way, through an analysis of interval relations between R, E and S. We begin by analyzing these intervals, some of them realized in Portuguese, through the perfect preterite of the indicative, imperfect preterite of the indicative and compound imperfect preterite of the indicative. Subsequently, we use non-stative verbs which indicate process or transition, to find out if a predicate is telic or atelic through tests of identification of telicity and the analysis of the interaction between the verb and its argument. As a result, we present semantic definitions of the lexical properties of these verbs in terms of process, transition and telicity for the subsequent use of these definitions and properties in an integrated way, although the systems responsible for encoding time, intervals and lexical aspect still operate independently. For this analysis, we propose an approximation between Verkuyl's theoretical proposals (1999, 2002), where we have the lexical definition of the verb through the property [+ -ADD TO] – which according to Arsenijevic (2006) introduces the potential of an event being mapped towards a scalar structure where we can understand this mapping through the relation between the semantic properties of the verb and the information that is contained in its argument [+ -SQA] – and Pustejovsky's (1992) approach, in which we have the semantic information of the verb presented through the transition (E1, ¬E2) and process (E1, En) properties. The motivation for the approximation of these theories is based on the fact that, in order to understand how the unfolding of an event occurs, it is important to observe the quantificational properties contained in the verb and what would be the values of n indicated by its argument, since we need at least two points for an event to unfold, and when

we get the value of n and integrate it with the lexical properties of the verb, we could observe how the telicity of this event occurs and whether its unfolding actually happens independently of the interval where this event is inserted.