Grammaticalization of the verb ‘visar’

Abstract

This article is the result of a search carried out within the scope of the Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese – Mato Grosso (PHPB-MT) and its main objective was to study the process of linguistic change in constructions with the verb visar. In this study, the grammaticalization trajectory of constructions with the verb visar was mapped, through an analytical description of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic behavior of the item in the light of the theoretical assumptions of Grammaticalization, from the perspective of Functional Linguistics. The occurrences with the object of this research were cataloged and analyzed from a panchronic sample, extracted from newspapers written and published in the state of Mato Grosso, in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in order to capture the variation and prove the historical change of the phenomenon under study. It is concluded that visar is in a grammaticalization process, in which it starts from a more concrete use, as a full verb, meaning “to look”, to a more abstract use, in the formation of periphrasis (visar + infinitive) with volition marking.