O desenvolvimento de verbos volitivos na língua portuguesa: uma abordagem construcional

Abstract

This work investigates the development of the volitional use of the verbs “querer”, “esperar”, “procurar”, “buscar” and “tentar” in the Portuguese language. Assuming as the theoretical perspective the constructional approach of the linguistic change (TRAUGOTT, 2003, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011c; TRAUGOTT & TROUSDALE, 2013; TROUSDALE, 2014), we part from the principle that the instantiation of the volitional meaning of these verbs consists in the emergence of grammatically identifiable constructions, which index the speaker‟s will. Therefore, we seek to establish, aligning ourselves more specifically to constructionalization postulates, a constructional network with different levels of schematicy, which would be the basis of this process (TRAUGOTT & TROUSDALE 2013; TROUSDALE , 2014). In the face of our goal, we selected a panchronic database, considering the distribution of the verbs “querer”, “esperar”, “procurar”, “buscar” and “tentar” from the XIII century until the contemporary Portuguese. The diachronic data were collected from the corpus of “CIPM – Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval” and the corpus of “Tycho Brahe” project. In its turn, the synchronic data cover both the oral and written modalities of the language. The orality was composed of interviews selected from three different corpora: the corpus of the “Projeto Mineirês: a construção de um dialeto”, the corpus of “PEUL - Programa de Estudos sobre o Uso da Língua” and the corpus of “NURC/RJ - Projeto da Norma Urbana Oral Culta do Rio de Janeiro”. In its turn, the syncronic data were also formed by written texts available on Internet, taken from blogs and magazines of wide national circulation (“Veja”, “Isto É”, “Época”, “Caras”, “Cláudia” e “Ana Maria”). In front of the equation between the consideration of the frequency of use and the qualitative analysis of identified occurrences, the results demonstrate that the verbs – which presented the idea of movement in their early meanings – start to index the subject‟s will. We emphasize that we understand volition as a scalar continuum, which comprises the ideas of intention and desire. It refers to an event to be played at a future time, and it is coded by different degrees of epistemic uncertainty that the speaker has about the achievement of this event. In this sense, we argue that the scheme involving volitional verbs in Portuguese would be directly related to the manifestation of irrealis category expressed by the presence of a [+ animated] subject – even if it is metaphorized –, accompanied by the verb and its complement. The subschemes of this macroconstructional pattern would differ from each other, formally, depending on the cognitive proximity established between the volitional subject and the target event of his/her will; in other words, from the understanding of the event, by the speaker, as [+/ irrealis]. Bearing in mind these (sub)schemas, we can relate the emergence of individual volitional constructions (micro-constructions) with “querer”, “esperar”, “procurar”, “buscar” and “tentar” and establish a constructional network on the development of volitional verbs in the Portuguese language.