Construction variation in transitive argument structures with the Portuguese verb "cessar" (to cease): a usage-based study

Abstract

This paper aims to describe two transitive argument structure constructions that instantiate the verb cessar (to cease) in Contemporary Portuguese: a) the prototypical transitive construction [X_agent CESSAR Y_patient]; b) the causative transitive construction [X_agent CESSAR.COM Y_patient]. In the light of Usage-based Linguistics (cf. BYBEE, 2010; CUNHA et al., 2013; TRAUGOTT e TROUSDALE, 2013; OLIVEIRA e ROSÁRIO, 2016; among others), we seek to investigate the properties of form and meaning of these constructions, as well as to check if they show a constructional variation relationship (cf. CAPPELLE, 2006; PEREK, 2015), since they both have agent subjects and patient objects. For this analysis, we applied a quali-quantitative methodology in which we identified and selected 128 tokens of both constructions, extracted from the Portuguese Corpus (www.corpusdoportugues.org). The results exhibit that the prototypical transitive construction and the causative transitive construction can be considered variants only in some contexts, due to the extensibility of the latter, which allows the instantiation of objects with different semantic properties.