O princípio é o verbo: uma análise do comportamento verbal no documento Vidas de Santos de um Manuscrito Alcobacense

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the syntactic behavior of the verbs that compose the Vidas de Santos de um Manuscrito Alcobacense corpus – copies from the 15th century, with editions available on the Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval (CIPM) website –, investigating the relationships between the verbs and their complements and looking for the existing variations. For this, a manual collection of the occurrences of each verb used was carried out, as well as the identification of their syntactic behavior in accordance with the meaning of their occurrences and the with elements around them in all seven texts that make up the chosen corpus; then, the verbs were classified following the studies of the area, in a proposal of conjunction of perspectives - the traditional and the generativist -, when possible. In all, 4,740 occurrences were gathered, analyzed and classified, with 420 unique verbs. This collection allowed us to verify at least 32 verbs that presented variations in their behavior, being constructed in different ways throughout the seven texts read, being able to alternate between the presence and absence of complements or varying the chosen prepositions, for example. About some of them, it was possible to raise hypotheses for their variations from clues given by the occurrences taken from the text, such as the chosen complement and its semantic trait, and also from studies already carried out by other researchers in the history of the Portuguese language. Based on the ideas brought by Saussure (2012 [1916]) and Coseriu (1979 [1958]), the present research can be classified, in part, as a synchrony, since it focuses on the same period - a cut of language -, at the same time that it unveils constructions allowed in a specific time still without standardization and reveals a linguistic performance, and can also be considered as a diachronic research. The present work, therefore, is in the history of the language, bringing to light some syntactic characteristics of the archaic period, which can also explain modern Portuguese phenomena and contribute to the studies in the history of the language.