O uso da concordância em construções do tipo ter/haver + particípio passado: uma descrição do português registrado no Amazonas no século XIX

Abstract

It only takes to compare normative/traditional Brazilian grammars to notice a consensus among traditional grammarians that the use of the participle together with the verbs ter/haver takes place with its invariable form about gender and number. However, in less monitored speech or writing situations, it is common to come across inflected participle constructions, even in the face of the verbs ter/haver. The central issue of this work arises from the observation that the construction with an inflected participle and the construction with an uninflected participle are not only structurally different, but can, in certain contexts, assume different meanings. Almeida (2009) already pointed out, in his grammar, such differences in meaning between sentences as ‘Tenho corrigido as lições’ and ‘Tenho corrigidas as lições’. Therefore, recognizing the existence of the two constructions and considering the treatment given to the participle in Prescriptive Grammars of Brazilian Portuguese, this work has the general purpose: To analyze the use of agreement in active sentences with ter/haver + past participle in commercial letters of the 19th century from the company of J.G Araújo (1881), registered in Amazonas; emphasizing the exercise of new functions (and/or new meanings) due to the alternance of its grammatical category. By assumptions of the North American Linguistic Functionalism, which prioritizes the study of language in a communicative situation and recognizes emergent mechanisms in language as a consequence of the need for more expressive forms or to attempt communicative purposes, our descriptive analysis contemplates the participle, for example, which, from a verb, also assumes to be an adjective, and which alternates between the two grammatical categories depending on the syntactic context in which it is inserted. Our data comes from 90 letters, totaling 54 occurrences with a participle inserted in the construction of the ter/haver type. We qualitatively analyzed the syntactic context of ter/haver + participle constructions and the only datum found with inflected participle, highlighting factors such as subject type, object type, object position, presence or absence of intervening material between participle and object, conjugation, verbal transitivity, markedness and iconicity. As a result of our research around the participle, we realized that it is problematic to make categorical statements regarding the definitive disappearance or permanence of inflected participle structures, since, in certain circumstances, the inflected participle syntax survives, and in others it is blocked. Therefore, we could verify that the syntactic structure in which the participle appears can directly influence the interpretation of the participle as [+verbal] or [+adjectival]. With this work, we seek, from the description of the usage of the participle in letters from the 19th century, to begin to elucidate questions that involve the motivations for the permanence of the inflected participle in constructions with ter/haver, which reach modern times, possibly, for semantic reasons, in other words, as matter of differentiating the meanings that each structure has. However, we understand that there is still a long way to go in this study.