A Cognitive-functional study of intensifying constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 16/00998-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2017
• End date: December 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Edson Rosa Francisco de Souza
• Grantee: Ana Ligia Scaldelai
• 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 the non-prototypical intensifying constructions in Brazilian Portuguese (such as puta da vida, roxo de raiva, vermelho de ódio, vermelho de vergonha, bonito pra burro, feio pra caramba, morto de fome, podre de bêbado, lindo de morrer, feio de doer, and so on), in a panchronic perspective, based on the theoretical assumptions of the constructional approach (TRAUGOTT and TROUSDALE, 2013; TRAUGOTT, 2008; GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006; CROFT, 2001), trying to identify the use of contexts that provide a constructional change of these expressions and investigate the morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic motivations that operate in the formation of the intensifying constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. The universe of investigation consists of spoken and written texts from the Corpus of Portuguese (DAVIS and FERREIRA, 2006), which allows the analysis of different synchronies of the Portuguese (from the fourteenth to the twentieth century) and spoken language surveys from the IBORUNA Corpus (GONÇALVES, 2007), which include the contemporary Portuguese.