The semantic property motion in the lexical representation of Brazilian Portuguese verbs (original) (raw)
Related papers
Translating motion verbs FROM ENGLISH TO PORTUGUESE: LEXICON AND CONSTRUCTIONS
Cadernos de Tradução, 2019
Based on Cognitive Linguistics, we investigate the use of motion verbs in English and Brazilian Portuguese basketball broadcasts Cad. Trad., Florianópolis, v. 39, nº 2, p. 166-183, mai-ago, 2019. 167 Heronides Moura & Lucas Badaracco and its implications for translation. This corpus, which represents a natural context of spoken language, included two National Basketball Association games. We found a total of 104 motion verb occurrences, 51 in English and 53 in Brazilian Portuguese, consisting of 46 different types in English and 26 in Brazilian Portuguese. This suggests that the broadcasts are somewhat equivalent in style, since a similar number of verbs were used in both languages. However, the variety of motion verbs and their meaning were asymmetrical. A wider variety of motion verbs is used in English than in Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, in English, there is a tendency to use verbs that encode MANNER in the verb root. In Brazilian Portuguese, on the other hand, the preferred verbs are less specific, encode PATH and provide less information about the manner of motion. Such differences are the source of the difficulties for translating motion verbs from English to Portuguese. For translation studies, this study corroborates the Unique Items Hypothesis, according to which an item is unique in a given language inasmuch as its grammatical contexts are unique in that language.
The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, RCL, 2010
seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.
2018
In the chapter we analyse two verbs of inherently directed motion such as ir 'go' and vir 'come' in two different modality languages-EP (European Portuguese) and LGP (Portuguese Sign Language), in order to discuss their main properties. We show that Romance languages, and Portuguese in particular, are not only verb-framed in the way they express motion and manner of motion and we show the importance of Prepositional Phrases in the construction of argument structure of verbs. As for Sign languages, and specifically LGP, we show, starting from a brief corpus, that this language, being closer to an "equipollently-framed language", has some properties that indicate that verbs are not the only way to express movement. We conclude that more important than a typological classification it is crucial to analyse morphological, lexical and syntactic resources that languages have in order to express manner and path of motion.
2022. The interaction of motion event (sub)components in Spanish motion verbs
Spanish, as a Romance language, can be considered a verb-framed language in Talmy's (1985, 1991) framework or a head path-coding language in Matsumoto's (2003, 2020, this volume) terminology. This means that the information related to the Path of motion is usually encoded in the main verb. Following Talmy's (2000) framework, the semantic component of Path covers three subcomponents: Vector that includes different types of trajectories-source, goals, etc., Conformation or the shape or geometric complex of Path, and Deictic or the motion to/from speaker and addressee). These subcomponents are illustrated in examples (1-3) respectively. (1) Vector El chico entra en la tienda Lit. 'The boy enters in the shop' (2) Conformation El chico rodea la casa Lit. 'The boy goes.around the house' (3) Deixis El chico viene del colegio Lit. 'The boy comes of-the school' Other authors, however, argue that these subcomponents may be worth analyzing separately given their own role in the configuration of the motion event in some languages. Deixis is such an element. Matsumoto (this volume) summarises some of the reasons why Deixis should be considered a different semantic component. First, it is always lexicalised even in languages with poor path verb repertoires. Second, it often has its own independent morphosyntactic slot (e.g. certain position in a serial verb, specific affix, etc.). Third, the use of Path and Deixis across languages does not always correlate; that is, when comparing two languages, for example, they might behave similarly with respect to Path but they might not do so in the case of Deixis, or vice versa 1. As far as Spanish is concerned, Deixis does not have a special encoding slot different from any of the slots or resources available to codify information about other semantic components. In other words, Deixis can be expressed in main verbs such as 1 In order to avoid ambiguity in the use of the term Path (Talmy's view or Matsumoto's view), this paper will treat Path and Deixis as separate elements, unless specifically stated.
The construction of a catalog of Brazilian Portuguese verbs
oegai.at
In this paper we present the construction of a lexical-semantic resource for the study of Brazilian Portuguese (BP): a "catalog" of BP verbs. The purpose of this catalog is to serve as a complete source of data, in which we present a large amount of verbs and sentences (over 800 verbs in over 5500 sentences in a first volume). An important characteristic of our project is that it is not a mere listing of verbs. Besides actually listing them, we group the verbs into semantically and syntactically coherent classes, adopting the hypothesis presented in Levin (1993) that semantic properties of verbs determine the syntactic realization of their arguments. We propose representations for the verbs using predicate decomposition, so that predicate decomposition structures define the verb classes. The syntactic properties of the verbs are presented in sample sentences and are related to the predicate decomposition structures. The relevance of our catalog is to be a complete resource for lexical-semantic studies in BP, not only a listing of verbs, but also a classification and an exhaustive exemplification. This catalog will take the forms of a printed version (Cançado, Godoy and Amaral, to appearfirst volume) and a digital database.
Journal of Universal Language
This is a semantic study of causative movement verbs that have been organized into two main groups consisting of similar and contrasting features. This analysis contradicts Van Valin & LaPolla (1997) and other authors working within the Role and Reference Grammar theoretical framework such as Jolly (1991, 1993), who defends the view that causative movement verbs only respond to one Aktionsart type (that is, to one type of mode of action): causative accomplishment verbs. I demonstrate that there are also * This paper was funded through the research project ANGI2005/14 (CAR). I would like to acknowledge the merits of my colleague and friend Rubén Fernández Caro, "a man from the Middle Ages". He gave me the passion for medieval literature and languages and helped me discover the fascinating world found in Tolkien's stories and languages, and especially in Quenya. This paper could have never been written without such underlying motivation.
On Verb Movement in Brazilian Portuguese: A Cartographic Study
This thesis investigates the issue of Verb raising in Brazilian Portuguese, from a Cartographic perspective, mainly based on Cinque (1999). Since adverbs and floating quantifiers have been traditionally taken as diagnostics for V-movement, the starting point of this investigation is to test the validity of such diagnostics from a Cartographic lens. This is achieved on the basis of Romance and English. It is suggested that "lower ("left-edge") adverbs are reliable diagnostics for V-raising, given the fact that, even in English, the V must raise past (some of) them. It is also explained why "higher adverbs" and Universal Floating Quantifiers are not (reliable) diagnostics, on the basis of their position of Merge in the Cinque Hierarchy and the assignment of scope to them (à la Kayne 1998). The thesis suggest, from a Cartographic perspective, that Brazilian Portuguese has Verbal Raising which is limited to a medial projection in the clause, namely, T-Anterior.
«The Mental Lexicon: A Contrastive Analysis of Motion Verbs in English and Spanish»
2020
This paper presents a theoretical approximation to the mental organization of language and therefore, to the existence of a mental lexicon where the lexical items of a language are stored and organized into semantic networks. These will be illustrated using a sample selection of motion verbs and making a contrastive analysis comparing the way English and Spanish shape these associations in a different way.
FLAVOURS OF vGO: AUXILIARIES OF MOTION IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE∗
2011
Cross-linguistically, many auxiliary verbs are also used as main verbs. Generally, the main-verb use has a more specific or substantive meaning than the auxiliaryverb use has. The purpose of this paper is to propose a systematic way of capturing the relation between these two uses, using Brazilian Portuguese as the empirical base. If successful, the account proposed here should shed light on how the representations of functional/grammatical elements and lexical/substantive elements differ in the (distributed) lexicon and in the syntax.