Volição, futuridade, irrealis: gramaticalização nas construções com o verbo querer

Abstract

Our objective of study is to verify the different possibilities of construction with “querer” followed by complements formed by V2. To this verification, our study is going to by guided, from functionalist discursive perspective, by two hypotheses we believe that complement each other: 1. The verb “querer”, by virtue of its volitional semantic load, always involves notions of projection, futurity and, therefore irrealis; 2. The different constructions with “querer” could be described according to the different syntactic-semantic relations established with V2 (either as an oration, or periphrasis forming a single semantic unit with “querer”); For the verification of the considered hypotheses and the application of the selected theories, we used a documental panchronic corpus constituted by complete texts: 1. From the XII to the XVI century, taken from the diachronic Corpus of CIMP and from the Camões Institute website; 2. From the XVII to the XX century, photographed and directly transcripted from the collection of the National Archive of Rio de Janeiro; 3. From the XX to the XXI century, directly transcripted of printed copies of the sector of criminal actions of the Federal Court of Criminal Judiciary Subsection of Rio de Janeiro and texts taken from the official website of Federal Supreme Court. And, how the occurrences found on the XXI century panchronic corpus were few, to validate the analysis undertaken in a written corpus of the actual Portuguese, we also used written texts taken from Você SA magazine to form a corpus exclusively synchronic in that the studied phenomenon appeared. “Querer” revealed, in our data, two recurring meanings: introducer of desire and of desire/politeness; but, with V2, can present semantic values of conclusion or discursive function that approaches of a discursive marker. After the qualitative analysis, we are going to verify the frequency of each one of the possible morphosyntactic configurations for the matrices with “querer” to verify the distribution of these constructions on the synchronic and panchronic corpora because we believe that the frequency of the using can be a determinant factor to elucidate grammaticalization processes. To board the stages of embedding and dependency between matrix and V2 observed in the different possibilities of oration conexions, we worked with the Lehmann proposal (1988) and the Halliday one (1994), and with the Bybee et alii proposal (1994), Hopper (1991), Heine (1993/1994) about the Grammaticalization Theory. The grammaticalization phenomenon is understood as a process that involves recruitment of lexical material that tends to a functional sliding in direction to one item more grammatical, but the permanency of the volitional trait prevents the completion of the process. Based on the theoretical approach discussed and the analysis undertaken, the two hypotheses first raised were confirmed for this study.