Usos do verbo saber e a expressão da evidencialidade no português brasileiro
- Authors
- Publication Date
- Aug 07, 2017
- Source
- Repositório Institucional UNESP
- Keywords
- Language
- Portuguese
- License
- Unknown
- External links
Abstract
Considering that the idea of knowledge provides an accessibility between linguistic and cognitive objects that is only meaningful through the notion of use, since the knowledge does not occur outside the significant experiences of the subject with the references from the world or from the human symbolic actions, the aim of this study is to describe the verb saber as a multiple functional verb in Brazilian Portuguese, seeking to confirm the hypothesis that it can be considered a form of expression of lexical evidentiality. Basically classified as a cognition verb, the verb saber presents other functionalities, such as the epistemic modality, in which the subject's commitment to the proposition he or she presents is evaluated; and the facultative modality, in which the ability of a participant to engage in the state-of-affairs is evaluated. There is also a reportative evidential use of the common knowledge of this predicate, in which the information is presented as shared knowledge between the speaker and the listener. Besides these uses, our hypothesis is that the verb saber can be also used to convey inferential and deductive evidentiality, observing the evidentials hierarchy proposed by Hengeveld and Hattnher (2015). Thus, based on the Functional Discourse Grammar theoretical-methodological approach we investigate the pragmatic-semantic and morphosyntactic domains involving the multifunctionality of this verb. The acceptance of this theoretical approach leads to the choice of a corpus which considers real uses of the language, represented here by Iboruna Database, Corpus do Português and by occurrences taken from the internet. In order to analyze the different uses of this verb, it is used the layered organization, and its different hierarchical levels of analysis, proposed by the Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008, p.13). In this hierarchical context, the different semantic expressions of the verb saber are classified. The analysis confirmed the existence of two other evidential uses of the verb saber not yet described in the literature: inferential and deductive. In addition, this research also contributes to the distinction between knowledge and information regarding occurrences with this verb. We demonstrate, therefore, throughout the investigation, that the verb saber expresses lexical evidentiality in Brazilian Portuguese, and, hence, we identify seven contexts of use: cognitive, informative, epistemic modality, facultative modality, reportative evidentiality, inferencial evidentiality and deductive evidentiality.
