Critérios de classificação de palavras no português: análise de conceitos lexicais em gramáticas brasileiras contemporâneas.

Abstract

In grammars of the Portuguese language, the study of word classes has always been present, with terms established by the Grammatical Tradition or even by the Brazilian Grammatical Nomenclature (NGB). With the existence of contemporary descriptions of Portuguese, it is assumed that the object of word classes has also been described by a new approach in these more recent compendia. It is necessary for a classification criterion to be related to the classified object and to the objective and need for classification, but the effective categorization of all words permeates the morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria, traditionally used in classification in the language. Furthermore, the verb, noun, adjective and adverb word classes are (partially) called lexical unit classes, which indicates that the classification of words into these classes occurs concomitantly with the expansion of the Portuguese language (open classes). The attempt to contemplate the classification criteria in the class descriptions inevitably occurs through a selection of a theoretical field, which becomes evident in the general conceptualizations of the class. In this context, we seek to analyze the presentations of the initial concepts of lexical word classes in contemporary Brazilian grammars (CBG)For this purpose, we selected the works by Neves (2018), Azeredo (2018) and Bagno (2012) as a CBG sample to generate the corpus. To this end, we consider theoretical contributions related to the grammatization process of the Portuguese language, such as Auroux (1992), Orlandi (2002) and Costa (2010), to the history and construction of word classification, according to Auroux (2009), Basilio (2019) and Bechara (2015), and to word classification criteria, such as Seara, Nunes and Lazarotto-Volcão (2011), Gonçalves and Almeida (2008), Cruz (2014) and Sampaio (2015), among others. Methodologically, this is a research with a qualitative approach, of a documental nature, with a descriptive purpose and a deductive method (MASCARENHAS, 2018; MOTTA-ROTH; HENDGES, 2010; BICUDO, 2011; GIL, 2008), as well as it is a study belonging to Theoretical Linguistics (PETTER, 2007). In summary, the definitions of the lexical word classes were elaborated from the morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria, and the discursive criterion was presented as a methodological approach until the initial conceptualization. In addition, it was found that the adverb was the class in which linguists were most distant from each other in the prioritized criterion for conceptualization. The work points to an identification of the textualinteractive criterion in the conceptualizations of lexical classes and to an understanding of the treatment initially given to classes in CBG written by linguists.