The history of o que in Portuguese interrogative clauses: from peripheral to general rule

• Grant number: 21/01980-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2021
• End date: January 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Historical Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves
• Grantee: Vitor Morelli Silva
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research seeks to investigate the variation between que and o que as interrogative pronouns throughout the history of Portuguese. The objective is to find hypotheses for the entry of o que in Portuguese, as well as to analyze the syntactic and textual contexts in which the structure appears more frequently through time. The corpus of this research is composed of the parsed texts from the Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese and the Post Scriptum Corpus.