Aspectualidade em libras: telicidade e duratividade

Since Vendler’s paper (1957), the study of the lexical aspect in several oral and sign languages throughout the world have been developed based on his division of verbal predicates. Vendler (1957) states that verbal predicates are divided into four groups: states, activities, achievements and accomplishments; he also mentions several features to distinguish among the groups. Later research, such as Dowty’s (1979), presents a fine-grained definition of the four verbal classes besides some tests we can use to set the difference between predicates from one or another group. Other research has been carried out about the aspect in Brazilian Sign Language – Libras (FERREIRA-BRITO. 1995; FINAU, 2004; OLIVEIRA, 2018) and it brings key enlightenments about the aspectual expression of that language. Based on research about lexical aspect and aspect in Libras from a formalist perspective, this paper aims to analyze Libras, focusing on the activity and accomplishment classes. Our main goal is to describe the ways through which telicity, one of the features used to distinguish the classes, influences the aspectual expression of the sentences and also to check which strategies are used to establish the difference between [+telic] and [-telic] sentences. To collect our data, based on the Controlled Elicitation proposed by Matthewson (2004) and Sanchez-Mendes (2014), we carried out three test from Dowty’s (1979 apud Wachowicz e Foltran, 2006): (i) the occurrence alongside the adjuncts in x time versus for x time; (ii) the imperfective paradox; and (iii) the ambiguity with ‘almost’. One of our contributions is the adaptation of such tests, once these tests were designed for oral languages and need to be adapted in order to capture the specificities of a sign language. The data found during our research points the usage of two distinct signs related to distance, [+bounded] and [-bounded], aside from the usage of a sign to express passing of time, to set the difference bet...