"Cortando um dobrado": uma análise do verbo "cortar" em uso

Abstract

Linguistic studies that deal with verbal predication usually take a verb-centered approach. We believe that verbal analysis based on its use, in a constructional approach, is extremely relevant for language studies, conceived in this work as based on cognitive, sociointeractional and cultural processes. Therefore, we aim to investigate the use of the verb to cut in a constructional approach, including, in this way, in the analysis process, besides syntactic and semantic matters, pragmatic factors, as well as cognitive processes, that lead to the Use-Centered Linguistics theoretical framework, supported by the functionalist and cognitive studies by Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Johnson (2002), Goldberg (1995, 2006), Fauconnier and Turner (2002), Traugott and Trousdale (2013), Bybee (2016), Langacker (1987), Fillmore (1968, 1977, 1982), Chafe (1979), Feltes (2007, 2018) and Ferrari (2016). We also work with the contributions of Borba (1991, 1996, 2002), Cançado (2018), among other authors. The corpus is composed by data on effective use of language, constituted of texts in oral and written forms, taken from interviews in Domingos Martins, Vitória and Santa Leopoldina cities and texts collected in A Gazeta newspaper, in the period from January to December 2017, counting 138 occurrences of the verb to cut in the oral modality and 978 in the written modality. The data were split in two groups, according to the modalities, analyzed qualitatively and quantified in percentage terms. The analyses showed that the verb to cut is instantiated in 02 groups of constructions, one made by schematic constructions, which are closer to the grammatical pole, and another made by substantive constructions, which are closer to the lexical pole. We found that the different meanings that emerge in the corpus for the verb to cut, often attributed to the verb itself as it occurs in general in dictionaries, are the result of the verb semantic combination and the construction. We observed that some meanings occur predominantly in texts that address specific subjects, such as politics, economics and sports, pointing out the influence of the thematic ambience on the meaning that emerges for the verb, by evoking different events and scenes.