(IM)PERFECTIVITY, ACTIONALITY AND TEACHING: USING NOTIONS OF FORMAL SEMANTICS IN BASIC EDUCATION

Abstract

This research report aims to describe the semantic behavior of the aspect-temporal inflection of Brazilian Portuguese and its relationship with the concept of (a)telicity and duration. The research is based in Formal Semantics theory, and thus, through an introspective methodology of data analysis and contributions from notions of tense, grammatical aspect (Klein, 1994), and lexical aspect (Vendler, 1957), we sought to demonstrate that combinations between the temporal-aspectual morpheme of events in the past tense of Brazilian Portuguese and the lexicon can generate interpretative differences in declarative sentences. Furthermore, three didactic proposals were developed based on the methodology of active language learning (Pilati, 2017) to address the topics discussed by the theory in Middle School or High School. The research results show that distinguishing between pretérito perfeito and pretérito imperfeito only by the completed versus not completed opposition is limited, failing to capture all the nuances stemming from perfective and imperfective aspects. Thus, it was demonstrated that Formal Semantics makes significant contributions not only to the linguistic analysis of this topic, but also in the elucidation of topics that are often challenging in the classroom, such as verbs and their forms in the past tense of Brazilian Portuguese.