Uma análise do verbo poder do português brasileiro à luz da HPSG e do léxico gerativo

Abstract

This study presents an analysis both syntactic and semantic of the verb poder in Brazilian Portuguese. To achieve this goal, we started with a literature review, which consisted of works dedicated to the study of auxiliarity and modality in order to determine what these issues imply and what is usually considered for classifying the verb under investigation as an auxiliary and/or modal verb. As foundations of this study, we used two theories, namely, HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Gramática de Estruturas Sintagmáticas Orientadas pelo Núcleo), a model of surface oriented generative grammar, which consists of a phonological, a syntactic and a semantic component, and GL (The Generative Lexicon O Léxico Gerativo), a lexicalist model of semantic interpretation of natural language, which is proposed to deal with problems such as compositionality, semantic creativity, and logical polysemy. Because these models are unable to handle the verb poder of the Brazilian Portuguese as they were originally proposed, it was necessary to use the GL to make some modifications in HPSG, in order to semantically enrich this model of grammar, so that it can cope with the logical polysemy of the verb poder, its behavior as a raising and a control verb, the saturation of its internal argument, as well as to identify when it is an auxiliary verb. The analysis showed that: (a) poder has four meanings inherent to it, namely, CAPACITY, ABILITY, POSSIBILITY and PERMISSION; (b) to saturate the internal argument of poder, the phrase candidate to saturate that argument must be of type [proposition] and the core of that phrase must be of type [event]. In case those types are not identical, the type coercion is applied in order to recover the requested type for that verb; (c) poder is a raising verb when it means POSSIBILITY, in such case it selects no external argument. That is, it accepts as its subject whatever the subject of its VP-complement is; (d) poder is a control verb when it means CAPACITY, ABILITY and/or PERMISSION and in this case it requires that the saturator of its internal argument be of type [entity] when poder means CAPACITY, or of type [animal] when it means ABILITY and/or PERMISSION; (e) poder is an auxiliary verb only when it is a raising verb, because only in this situation it does not impose any selectional restrictions on the external argument and (f ) poder is considered a modal verb because it can express an epistemic notion possibility and at least three non-epistemic notions of modality capacity, ability and permission.