FICTIVE CHANGE IN BRAZILIAN CORPUS OF SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

Abstract

This work investigates fictive change occurrences in spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as The room got bigger after removing the furniture (O quarto ficou muito maior depois que retiraram os móveis), in which a change expressed by the predicate occurs only due to the perception of a conceptualizer. In other words, the room has not expanded its particular dimensions, but the resultative nature of this change occurs only in the subjective plan. Some authors in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) have been addressed this phenomenon (see SWEETSER, 1996, 1997, and MATSUMOTO, 1996), which shows that the vision of an object takes on another dimension, shape, or state when there is a change in the perception of the conceptualizer. Such theoretical aspects lay the foundations of empirical feasibility of fictive change in spontaneous speech data of PB. In this view, the methodology complies with the search for occurrences of change verbs (e.g. "become") in the informal part of the corpus C-ORAL-BRAZIL (RASO & MELLO, 2012), associated with the listening of audio files and concomitantly to the study of the transcripts. Thus, temporal, spatial and bodily extent patterns were listed, in which the change is only subjective or fictive in nature. The results also point to the fact that the construction is related to a breakdown of default expectation, resulting in something that only occurs under a conceptual perspective.