Negative operator nem: a pragmatic-semantics analysis

• Grant number: 18/17642-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2019
• End date: December 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Dirceu Cleber Conde
• Grantee: Isaac Souza de Miranda Junior
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese, like any other language, has a broad range of semantics operators (e, ou, mas, para). These operators may has harder or malleable syntactics positions, but they always preserve their semantics and logic features on all of syntactics positions. The operator nem has a single and uncommon behavior compared to others elements of your class (negative operators). Nem is extremely malleable on your syntactics positions, keeping yours semantics meaning, negative aspect and, on theory, a pragmatic coefficient. However some questions must be explained: what triggers the interpretation of nem beyond the literal meaning? How does nem interacts on structures together other elements? What is the difference between nem and não? What allows nem coordinates, grammatically, sentences like "O Mathias nem estudou nem dormiu nem o Conrado"? This project aim to elaborate a description of the operator nem with syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analyze create a final formalization to operator. The initial hypothesis is, the operator carries besides the simple logical negation (¬) some propositional content may, or not, come from a generalized implicature.