O verbo andar e sua formação de perífrase atualizadora de aspecto no português

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate the grammaticalization process of the verb "andar (walk)” in the Portuguese language, more specifically the "andar + gerund" construction. First, we have started from the hypothesis that such an verb faces mechanisms of change related to the process of grammaticalization – metaphorization, metonymization and reanalysis. This verb runs along a path of increasing abstraction, functioning not only as a full verb with a [+ concrete] sense – an indicator of physical displacement - but also, as a semi-auxiliary verb, thus indicating a [- concrete] sense of aspect update (MEILLET, 1912; HOPPER & TRAUGOTT, 2008 [1993]; FINEGAN, 1995; TRAUGOTT, 1995; TRAUGOTT & DASHER 2005)In order to prove our hypothesis, we carried out a panchronic survey of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It aimed at proving which of these uses would be frequent. The data of the 20th and 21st centuries cover both the oral and the written modalities of the language. From these data, the oral ones were collected in three distinct corpora, namely: the corpus of the "Mineirês Project: the construction of a dialect", the corpus of the project "PEUL - Program of Studies on the Use of Language" and the corpus of the project "NURC / RJ - Project of the Urban Cultivated Norm in Rio de Janeiro". The written modality corpora of these centuries were composed of texts available on the Internet, extracted from blogs and magazines of great national circulation ("Revista Veja", "Revista Isto é", "Época Magazine", "Revista Caras", "Revista Cláudia" and "Revista Ana Maria") and by texts made available by the "Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira" website. The texts of the 19th century, in turn, were selected from the corpus of the project “Tycho Brahe” - and cover only the written modality. In the data analysis, we described in detail the different uses of the verb "andar", emphasising the construction "andar + gerund" and detailing how this construction updates the durative aspect of the action. In addition, we analyzed the distribution and frequency of use of the verb "andar", since we assume that the high frequency can act as an important subsidy in the definition of grammaticalization processes (BYBEE, 2003). The results indicate that the verb "andar" in the Portuguese language is able to present both the initial [+ concrete] sense of "physical / temporal displacement" and [- concrete] uses of "evaluation" and "durative aspect updater". In this process, as we demonstrate in the examples, the verb "andar" works not only as a full verb, but also, as a semi-auxiliary verb.