Abstract

CARVALHO, Maria José. Socio-cognitive aspects of semantic variation and change: haver and ter in possession structures. Diacrítica [online]. 2014, vol.28, n.1, pp.347-375. ISSN 0807-8967.

In contemporary European Portuguese, as we know, the notion of possession is expressed by the verb ter, with haver confined to existential structures. In medieval Portuguese, teer and auer, when they had lexical content, were often used in the same context, with no significant differences between them. There have been numerous studies on these verbs in possession structures, but the reasons and conditions for the gradual substitution of auer by ter have still not been explained. The present analysis is based on Silva ´s (1995) semantic typology of the complement of the predicate: AM-type structures and AI-type structures. In a corpus of juridical documents, we have analyzed the evolution of this gradual replacement of auer by ter, attempting to answer two questions: what was the reason that ter began to replace auer in AM-type possession structures?, and what were the external conditions (social, cultural and cognitive) whereby ter moved into AI-type expressions during the 15th century?

Keywords : Cognition; Cognitive Semantics; Historical Semantics; Semantic Variation and Change.

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