Insubordinate construction se ao menos in Brazilian Portuguese verbal slot from a collostructional analysis point of view

• Grant number: 22/07421-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): September 26, 2022
• Effective date (End): January 25, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Flavia Bezerra de Menezes Hirata Vale
• Grantee: Maria Julia Bernardo Comarim
• Supervisor: Renata Enghels
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Ghent University (UGent), Belgium
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/11125-5 - Se ao menos-insubordinate construction in Brazilian Portuguese: a collostructional analysis, BP.IC

Abstract

This project seeks to analyze the insubordinate conditional construction headed by "se ao menos'' that, unlike those in which the main clause is expressed, only admits verbs in the imperfect subjunctive. This tendency is being investigated through a collostructional analysis, that is a Corpus Linguistics approach that aims to discover which lexical items co-occur inside a given construction. Thus, this project proposes the analysis of the verbs that appear with the insubordinate conditional construction with "se ao menos" and the relation with the expected meaning, namely the expression of desire (COMARIM, 2021). There is a strong attraction between the construction and verbs that express some kind of modalization, especially epistemic and deontic, like "saber", "conseguir" and "poder". So, in order to arrive at a better understanding and to explore the results of the quantitative analysis, this project aims to highlight the productivity of the verbs whose use is licensed in the "se ao menos" construction, a task that would benefit from a research internship at Ghent University, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Renata Enghels. Prof. Enghels is a specialist in corpus research from a functional and cognitive perspective, and focuses on the functional relations between formal-syntactic structures in Romance languages, besides being a specialist in Construction Grammar, the perspective adopted on this research. (AU)