GRAMMATICALIZATION OF THE VERB "DEIXAR" IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: A CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH

• Grant number: 15/21622-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date until: April 01, 2016
• End date until: December 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Edson Rosa Francisco de Souza
• Grantee: José Roberto Prezotto Júnior
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The aim of the research is to analyze, based on theoretical assumptions of Grammaticalization (TRAUGOTT, 1982; HEINE et al, 1991; HOPPER and TRAUGOTT, 1993; TRAUGOTT, 2003), Construction Grammar (CROFT, 2001; GOLDEBERG, 1995 ; TRAUGOTT, 2008), and Functionalism (GIVÓN, 1979; DIK, 1997; NEVES, 1997, 2000, 2006; HENGEVELD and MACKENZIE, 2008), the multifunctionality and the GR process of the verb "deixar" in Brazilian Portuguese, from a diachronic and synchronous perspective, taking into account their syntactic, semantic, pragmatic-discursive and cognitive properties. In other words, the aim is to analyze the GR of the verb "deixar", in order to identify the functional motivations for using this verb in different contexts of Brazilian Portuguese usage, including the complex constructions that acquire specific meanings. We used as a research material the Corpus of Portuguese organized by Davis and Ferreira (2006), composed of more than 45 million words. This corpus includes spoken and written texts and enables the search of data by (i) selection of Portuguese variety (European and Brazilian), (ii) historical period of the Portuguese (14th to 20th century), (iii) record type /gender (oral, fiction, journalistic and academic), and also enables measuring the frequency of use.