THE OPERATIVE SEMANTICS OF THE VERBS ‘DEIXAR’ AND ‘COMEÇAR’: AN ANALYSIS USING THE TOPE BIAS
Theory of Predicative and Enunciative Operations; Category; Presupposition; Pre Construction
This thesis, included in the line of research Studies of Meaning Processes of the Stricto Sensu Postgraduate Program in Linguistics at the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT), aims to analyze utterances with occurrences of the verbs Começar a and Deixar de, a in order to understand the enunciative processes of their functioning, focusing on the role of the construction of meaning. In this scenario, we insert the study of presupposition as a theoretical question, observing the status of representation stability in the enunciative resumption. To achieve this, in our analyses, we use the activity of manipulating and reformulating utterances through the elaboration of epilinguistic glosses, which allow us to understand the functioning of these forms for the construction of predication and, consequently, meaning. To this end, we based the development of the research on the proposal of Antoine Culioli, proponent of the Theory of Predicative Enunciative Operations (CULIOLI, 1990, 1999a, 1999b). We seek to visualize the category process that encompasses the verbs ‘Começar a’ and ‘Deixar de’ as activators of presupposition, with the aim of confirming our hypothesis, namely, the presupposition, understood in the assertions as a guarantee of representation, does not hold up from an operational point of view. Conceiving that categorization does not contribute to the understanding of how the experiential variation of subjects underlies the determination of the meanings of the presupposed linguistic unit, our methodology was based on the activity of reformulation, also called glossing or paraphrasing (FRANCKEL, 2011; FUCHS, 1985 ). In this way, we created statements that allowed us to observe the functioning of these verbs in context. The results show that in the occurrences of the selected verbs, the (variable) experience of the enunciating subjects with the world and with language results in inventoried meanings that present ready results in which there is no process to be constructed.