Semantic description and analysis of intensity in Libras

Abstract

Despite the existence of some studies that describe and analyze phonetic and morphophonological resources employed in the expression of intensity in Libras (XAVIER, 2014, 2017; SANTOS; XAVIER, 2019a, 2019b), to date the semantic dimension of this process has not been formally explored in any work. Aiming to take a first step in this direction, the present study, based on data collected from a native deaf signer of Libras, proposes, within the scope of Formal Semantics, an analysis of 11 verbal predicates of that language. Among the different forms collected from these predicates, we focus on those produced with two hands, with simultaneous movement and without repetition, as they are interpretable as intense. Precisely, according to the same native deaf signer, these forms express notions of emphasis, effort, confirmation and completeness. In this work, we offer a unified formal treatment for all of these notions, through a proposal that takes into account a type-changing function that provides verbs with a degree variable and a scalar variable associated with different aspects of intensity, similarly to Caudal & Nicolas (2005) and Sanchez-Mendes (2014).