A semântica dos adjuntos temporais: uma proposta de análise com a semântica de vetores

Abstract

The semantic study of the temporal-aspectual phenomena, such as temporal reference, aspect and actionality, is an important area of the Semantic of Events. One of the main objectives in this research field is the delimitation of the different types of events that can be denoted by structures of the natural languages, among which we find the events belonging to the so-called “vendlerian classes”. Since Vendler (1957), temporal adjuncts are important tools used to make actional and aspectual distinctions. However, even if it is possible to find in the literature several analysis for the adjuncts ‘em X tempo’ (‘in x time’) and ‘por X tempo’ (‘for X time’), the semantic investigation for other adjuncts like ‘durante X tempo’ (‘during X time’), ‘até X tempo’ (‘until X time’) and ‘de X a Y tempo’ (‘from X to Y time’), among others, is still incipient, and the investigations most of the time consider only the perfective aspect. Thus, the aim of the present dissertation is to analyze the semantics and pragmatics of some temporal adjuncts, with the purpose of providing a description of these items in Brazilian Portuguese within the formal semantics framework. Thus, the purpose of this work is to study the combinations of certain temporal adjuncts with the different types of events, under different aspects, through the concepts brought by Semantics of events, and offer formalizations for these combinations in the perfective aspect using Vector Space Semantics theory (Zwarts, 1997; Zwarts and Winter, 2000; Bergamini-Perez and Basso, 2017). We propose a unified analyzes for their several possibilities of interpretation and their role as a delimiter of the characteristic features of events.