On the inchoativity of the portuguese verbs endingin -ecer

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Rui
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Fórum Linguístico
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/forum/article/view/79094

The Portuguese grammatical tradition generally assumes that -ecer is a suffix component characteristic of inchoative verbs, in other words, verbs that express the beginning of a state or process. In this article, we will seek to determine the extent to which this aspectual value of the verbs ending in -ecer is attested in both contemporary Portuguese and earlier stages of the language. For that purpose, we will analyse the meaning of five verbs ending in -ecer (adormecer ‘to fall asleep’, amanhecer ‘to dawn’, amarelecer ‘to yellow’, apodrecer ‘to rot’, endurecer ‘to harden’) along their diachronic path based on instances found in the CIPM - Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval and lexicographic corpora published from the 16th century onwards. The available data allow us to conclude that as early as Ancient Portuguese, verbs ending in -ecer denote events that focus on the final stage of the change suffered by an entity, rather than expressing an event in its beginning.