[DAR ruim] AND [DAR bom]: two idiosyncratic idioms from brazilian portuguese

Abstract

Dar is a Portuguese verb used prototypically in the prepositional dative construction, e.g.: ele deu um anel de diamantes para a noiva (in English, he gave a diamond ring to his bride). According to Goldberg (1995), in this kind of construction, a transference meaning emerges from the interaction of the following semantic roles and syntactic functions: an agent as the subject, a patient as the direct object and a recipient as the indirect object. Although dar usually recruits NPs or PPs as arguments, likewise the English verb to give, it has been widely used in a very idiosyncratic and idiomatic construction in Brazilian Portuguese, where the verb is followed by the adjectives ruim or bom, e.g.: deu ruim, mas está tudo bem (in English, things went bad, but everything is fine). In this paper, we aim to describe this construction, which we represent with the following notation: [DAR ADJ]. Our analysis is based on the theoretical assumptions of Usage-Based Linguistics (cf. ROSÁRIO & OLIVEIRA, 2016; BYBEE, 2010; TRAUGOTT & TROUSDALE, 2013; among others.), especially on the notion of construction as a symbolic form-meaning pairing and on the property of partial/non-compositionality. A total of 200 tokens of [DAR bom] and [DAR ruim] were selected from Corpus Now and analyzed through a quali-quantitative study. The results show that both constructions have been used in argumentative and intersubjective contexts (cf. TANTUCCI, 2018) for evaluative reasons. Moreover, [DAR ruim] is more productive than [DAR bom]: while the word string composed by verb + ruim always instantiate the construction [DAR ADJ] in the corpus, the string composed by verb + bom is more likely to instantiate a more compositional construction – [DAR][NP] –, where the adjective belongs to a NP: e.g., o padre deveria dar [bom exemplo] (in English, the priest could give a [good example]).