Aspectos do aspecto: revisitando a discussão sobre os morfemas aspectuais do português

Abstract

This paper discusses the morphosemantic nature of grammatical aspect morphemes in Portuguese—particularly in the Brazilian variety—with a focus on the exponents of the so-called “nominal forms of the verb,” namely the infinitive (-r), gerund (-nd-), and participle (-d-). Based on data collected through introspection as well as from documentary research (i.e., consultation of dictionaries and online searches), this study analyzes the aspectual composition of these morphemes within the framework of Formal Semantics. To this end, the paper first addresses the problem of aspectual characterization from both an empirical and conceptual standpoint, and subsequently discusses the types of readings that are (or can be) associated with the various uses of the infinitive, gerund, and participle morphemes. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these morphemes retain their semantic compositionality regardless of the syntactic environments in which they occur, and to provide a broader overview of aspectual morphemes in Portuguese at the interface between morphology and semantics.