Insubordinate adversative conditional constructions in Brazilian Portuguese: prosodic aspects

• Grant number: 20/02513-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: October 01, 2020
• End date: June 30, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Flavia Bezerra de Menezes Hirata Vale
• Grantee: Camila Pires Alves
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 21/06676-2 - Prosody as a formal parameter in a constructional analysis of insubordinate adversative conditional constructions in Brazilian Portuguese, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

Recently, there are many studies that analyze a linguistic phenomenon regarding the nonprototypical use of complex sentences. These are sentences that, although showing some mark of subordination, are used independently, without being related to a matrix clause, a phenomenon called "insubordination" (Evans, 2007). Following this trend, this project aims to describe the insubordinate conditional constructions with adverse value in Brazilian Portuguese based on cognitive-functional concepts (Traugott and Trousdale, 2013) and considering the level of prosodic analysis (Jun, S. A., 2005). For this purpose, two corpora will be used, one composed by occurrences available in online corpora and one ad hoc corpus, this last one, for prosodic analysis. In works describing this phenomenon in Spanish (Schwenter 2016; Garcia, 2017), prosody proved to be fundamental to demarcate the syntactic independence of these constructions, because in cases of segmental stimuli of the same structure, intonation is a single differentiating element between constructions elliptical and insubordinate. Although Portuguese is an intonative language and has some of its meanings determined prosodically, the relations between syntax and prosody are little explored and there are still no studies that analyze the insubordinate conditional constructions through the interrelationship between these two linguistic levels. With the result of this project, which proposes the analysis and description of a phenomenon not yet fully described, it is expected to contribute to a gap in the studies of conditional constructions, to strengthen the relations between syntax and prosody and together with works carried out in other languages (Debaisieux and Deulofeu, 2019; D'Hertefelt, 2015; López, 2019, Gras, 2011, etc.), contribute to the understanding of this phenomenon as a whole. (AU)