The ordering of post-nuclear modifiers of the noun phrase

• Grant number: 20/00492-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: June 01, 2020
• End date: July 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Roberto Gomes Camacho
• Grantee: Nathalia Pereira de Souza Martins
• 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
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/11114-6 - The morphosyntactic positioning of post-nominal modifiers: a functional discourse analysis, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the ordering of constituents at the noun phrase level, more specifically the morphosyntactic organization of post-nuclear modifiers, in order to verify which ordering principles are behind the process and which is the prototypical order of Brazilian Portuguese. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), this work aims to verify if the modification categories proposed by Rijkhoff (2008), in a typological study of the nominal phrase, apply to Brazilian Portuguese, in order to ascertain whether, in addition to the ordering principles, the semantic and pragmatic nature of modifiers can determine (or partly influence) the order of elements. Our initial hypotheses predict the performance of different principles, possibly in competition, such as Iconic Ordering, Scope, Centripetal Ordering, Domain Integrity, Linear Ordering and Increasing Complexity (DIK, 1997), and the influence of pragmatic and semantic aspects in determining of the order of the post-nuclear modifiers of the nominal phrase. The constitution of the data sample for analysis consists of spoken language records extracted from Corpus Iboruna, which represents the spoken variety of São José do Rio Preto. As a methodology, we intend to select noun phrases with more than one post-nuclear modifier and apply pragmatic, semantic and morphosyntactic criteria, seeking a detailed description of both the order of the elements and the nature of the modifiers. (AU)