Reportative evidential conditional in Brazilian Portuguese political discourses: a cognitivist description of point of view and perspective phenomena

• Grant number: 22/08776-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Flavia Bezerra de Menezes Hirata Vale
• Grantee: Beatriz de Souza Mella
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/08854-0 - Viewpoint and perspective phenomena: analysing the conditional reportative in Brazilian Portuguese, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

As in other Romance languages, such as French (DENDALE, 2012) and Spanish (BÖHM; HENNEMANN, 2014), Lourenço (2016) and Mella (2020) consider that, in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the conditional, in addition to temporal and modal values, can express evidentiality. Hengeveld and Hattnher (2015) propose an evidential typology where the reportative subtype is found, encompassing evidential cases in which the speaker passes on information from third parties. The conditional can be one of the reportative markers of evidentiality and may function as a discursive strategy for the speaker to disengage from the enunciated content, as verified by Lourenço (2016), in texts in the journalistic domain, and Mella (2020), in political speeches. Mella (2020)'s description showed the need to develop an analysis of the reportative conditional (CR) from a cognitivist perspective, as a form of expression of point of view and perspective, once, when reporting content, the speaker does not express their own cognitive material, but they pass on that of others, as Hattnher (2018) points out. Thus, based on the enrichment of the research corpus used in Mella (2020), composed of political speeches from the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, it is proposed in this project to describe the use of CR in BP as a form of expression of the phenomena of point of view and perspective adopting a cognitivist approach, based on Dancygier (2017) and Vandelanotte (2019). It is intended to use a quali-quantitative analysis of the data and a formal description of CR in BP to determine the discursive contexts in which CR is used are the strategies employed by the speaker in the expression of reportativity as a means of perspectivization. It is expected, therefore, with this work to expand the studies of the conditional with evidential value in BP.