Os phrasal verbs sob uma perspectiva cognitivista: composicionalidade e metaforicidade

Abstract

The present work is aimed at analyzing the phrasal verbs (PVs) occurring with up and down in the English language within the general theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics (Langacker, 1987, 1990, 1991, 2006, 2008), especially in regard to the metaphorical aspects of these constructions (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) within a constructional perspective to language use (Fillmore & Kay, 1999; Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Langacker, 2008). The notions of compositionality and idiomaticity are discussed in view of the data collected, which come mainly from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and are discussed from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective (Lacerda, 2016) under the premises of Corpus Linguistics (Berber Sardinha, 2000; Tagnin, 2002; McEnery & Hardie, 2012). Our main hypothesis is that some PVs have a more compositional organization, since they are more grounded (Langacker, 1990) on spatial and temporal deixis and have more concrete and objective readings. Others, on the other hand, have a more constructional configuration as they tend to be less grounded on deixis and more dependent on metonymic and metaphorical relations and image schemas projections (Lakoff, 1987; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; RudzkaOstyn, 2003; Croft & Cruse, 2004), which are activated by an intersubjective (Almeida, 2010; Almeida & Ferrari, 2012) and abstract manner. We also assume that compositional PVs only conceive a given event, whereas constructional PVs tend to integrate more than one event, thus being accessed only by means of semantic extension, be it metonymic or metaphorical relations, revealing processes of greater (inter)subjectivity in their conceptualization.