Auxiliary and aspectualizer verbs: some syntactic and semantic distinctions

Abstract

The present work aims at distinguish auxiliaries and
aspectualizers verbs behavior in Brazilian Portuguese. Some
prototypical verbs of these kinds are estar, continuar, ficar, ter
(auxiliars) and começar, acabar, parar (aspectualizers). I
assume that there are semantic features in interaction with
syntactic structures that are directly modified by historical processes. In semantic perspective, the auxiliaries lost some
lexical features – aspect and thematic information, but seem
to preserve actionality features, specially the ‘durative’ one.
This phenomenon is called in the literature “semantic
persistency” and characterizes the desemantization of
auxiliaries in periphrases. On the other hand, aspectualizer
verbs do not lose semantic features, because verbs such as
begin ‘começar’ and stop ‘parar’ do not fulfil the requirement of
desemantization and maintain their original value. In syntactic
perspective, the auxiliaries lose transitivity and do not need a
direct complement to enclose a meaning. Aspectualizers verbs
need a complement that denotes temporalized events or time
intervals, but they can be in some structures elllipsed or
nominalized. So, in historical perspective, auxiliaries are in
grammaticalization process, but aspectualizers do not.
Auxiliaries were predicates and denoted eventualities which
actually maintain the durative feature, and the aspectualizers
aren´t predicates and denote operators that must act on another
event, which is its direct complement.