The transitive construction in Brazilian Portuguese: towards an association of Construction Grammar to Lexical Decomposition

This paper aims to show how Construction Grammar Theory (GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006) may be associated with a lexical-semantic approach in order to observe verb classes, namely, the predicate decomposition of verbs. In other words, we assume that predicate decomposition can be a useful tool to describe the meaning of argument structure constructions. Therefore, we make an analysis of the transitive construction in Portuguese with the objective of illustrating our main proposal. Six major classes of verbs in BP are investigated, and their semantic representations are presented; then, they are checked with the transitive construction. The main goal is to reach the meaning of the construction, which, as shown before, may not be described in general terms, i.e,. it cannot be given in terms of a schematic single meaning, but it actually can be considered in terms of a network of related meanings. Those meanings are understood as metaphorical extensions based on a prototypical meaning. At the end, we also provide a representation for the transitive construction in Portuguese taking into account its prototypical meaning.