Construções transitivas com verbos dicendi em língua inglesa: processos de significação

Abstract

This work aims at understanding the relationship between the process of meaning and context, via verbal transitivity. Our general hypothesis is that the participants would have an easier understanding of the structures in which the arguments placed after the verbs had met its transitivity. And, with the largest number of language items allowed by the structure, transitivity would act as a facilitator of communication interaction. For this work, we have anchored on the theory of conventional imagery, in special on the notion of Trajector and Landmark proposed by Langacker (2008). Based on experimental psycholinguistic methodology, we have had as dependent variables time and rate of accuracy and the transitivity as an independent variable with three conditions: not prepositioned arguments, prepositioned arguments and simultaneously prepositioned and not prepositioned arguments. This experiment was conducted with young informants from sixteen (16) to eighteen (18) years old, Brazilians natives. After the application of the experiments, the data were treated in three programs, the Qualtrics, and two statistical packages, R and ACTION. Regarding the results, we concluded that there is a relationship between the context and the process of signification. The presence in opposition to the absence of the preposition seems to have acted as facilitator of the understanding.