Os nomes gerais [-humano] no português setecentista de Minas Gerais, Brasil

Abstract

General nouns with [-human] trace in Brazilian Portuguese from the 18th century, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, such as coisa, matéria, bem, questão, negócio are analyzed, being divided in four categories, for methodological purposes: prototypical, thematic, possessive and ambiguous. The theoretical support was mainly based on Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Amaral and Ramos (2014). The hypothesis that guides the description of those lexical items is that they present variation in their levels of genericity, according to the context where they are used. The genericity level in the use of every general noun can vary, but there is a prototypical use, which has wider referential potential.