Putting radial categorization to test: what can we learn from Brazilian Portuguese verbs of separation?

• Autor(a) principal: Pinheiro, Diogo
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Muniz, Jéssica Cassemiro
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Confluência
• Texto Completo: https://revistaconfluencia.org.br/rc/article/view/519
• topic: Categorização; Verbos de separação; Estrutura semântica; Português brasileiro; Categorization; Verbs of separation; Semantic structure; Brazilian Portuguese

When it comes to categorization, Cognitive Linguistics is well known for rejecting the aristotelic ideal of classical definability. Such a rejection, however, still seems to lack empirical support. In this paper, we report an elicited production experiment aimed at investigating the semantics of three Brazilian Portuguese (BP) verbs of separation: “cortar” (‘to cut’), “quebrar” (‘to break’) and “rasgar” (‘to tear’). In this experiment, 49 native speakers of BP were asked to provide oral descriptions of video-recorded separation scenes. The results provide empirical support to the rejection of classical definability as well as allow for the description os the semantic structure of the three verbs at stake.