Consirar e entender em português – elementos para um estudo diacrónico

In Contemporary Portuguese, verbs such as considerar ‘consider’ and entender ‘understand’ contrast in their more ‘lexical’ uses, as opposed to uses where epistemic values emerge, in the sense that there is a linguistic expression of subjective assessment of what is expressed. This paper aims to examine the factors which diachronically determined the emergence of such values and thus the (non-overlapping) convergence of considerar and entender in (more) ‘grammatical’ uses, bearing in mind that the opposition ‘lexical’ / ‘grammatical’ should be understood as non-discrete. The data of Old and Middle Portuguese (13th to 15th centuries) consirar and entender which are presented and discussed were collected according to evidence dating criteria, text genre diversity and the reliability of the editions. The various constructions using consirar and entender are described and the distinct factors enabling epistemic readings are identified. The data shows that the processes of emergence of epistemic values of the two verbs are at different stages, but also appears to evidence the interference of similar contextual factors for the possibility of epistemic interpretations, thus leading to their convergence in epistemic uses. The paper concludes by pointing out some issues for future research, in particular the need to include other competing forms/constructions, not only with verbs such as achar ‘find’ and julgar ‘judge’, which synchronically show different usage restrictions, but also haver and ter ‘have’, since the latter could also occur with epistemic meanings in past stages of Portuguese.