The diachronic path of achar in Portuguese: from a propositional to an epistemic verb

Abstract

Abstract In this article I investigate the diachronic path of the Portuguese verb achar ‘to find/consider’, from a main propositional verb (in the sense of Traugott 1989), in earlier stages of the language, to a verb with epistemic reading, which is the default interpretation in Contemporary European Portuguese (CEP). Based on a sample corpus of texts comprehended between the 13th and the 17th century, I have concluded that the epistemic reading of achar was incipient until the 16th century, despite the existence of a few examples in the 13th century. This grammaticalization process seems to be recent in the language since epistemic readings remain infrequent until the 17th century and I did not find parenthetical uses in the corpus. Nevertheless, data under analysis allowed me to identify two possible syntactic contexts that may have favoured the semantic change: complement clauses and transitive-predicative constructions. The evolution of achar ‘to find/consider’ seems to follow the pattern of semantic change proposed by Traugott (1989) and Traugott/Dasher (2002) under the notion of subjectification, with achar starting with an objective meaning and later acquiring an epistemic reading, following the assumption that meanings tend to become centered in the subjective belief or attitude of the speaker.