Há classificadores verbais em libras?

Abstract

The descriptive works on the Brazilian Sign Language - LSB, have increased gradually, the researches are aim for the several areas: phonetics, morphology, syntax, seman-tics among others. No matter how many studies there are, there are always going to be gaps, it is exactly in one of these that the present research is based upon, the presence or lack of the verbal classifiers in LSB. Thus, the present research aims to investigate if indeed the motion verbs FALL, WALK and CATCH understood here in the typology of Supalla (1986), are verbal classifiers in LSB, considering that there is no consensus between authors concerning the existence of these. For this, we made use of the theoretical line of the functional-cognitive linguistics, once it takes into ac-count the language in real use situations, thus, through its concepts we analyzed whether in fact these verbs are verbal classifiers or not. The data for analysis are the results of interviews recorded on video with Roraima’s Deaf. Then descriptions were made with the help of the Elan program for the signs detailed description, and out of these, we selected those that brought the verbs already mentioned, in this way we were able to verify the peculiarities of each achievement, and from these, we made the analysis that showed the following results: in the phrases with the FALL element the data varied the most, once the sentences were separated into two blocks, the first with phrases of metaphorical-abstract nature, the second with phrases of concrete nature. The sentences of the first block showed great variation of realization, in other words, some signs were perform very different from one another. In these sentences, the verb FALL acted only as motion verb, and not as classifier. The only place where this verb showed traces of classifier was in some of the examples of concrete nature phrases. As for the other two elements WALK and CATCH, they acted only as motion verbs.