Viewpoint and perspective phenomena: analysing the conditional reportative in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 23/08854-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: November 01, 2023
• End date: April 30, 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
• Supervisor: Maria Sol Sansiñena
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Leuven, Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium
• Associated to the scholarship: 22/08776-7 - Reportative evidential conditional in Brazilian Portuguese political discourses: a cognitivist description of point of view and perspective phenomena, BP.MS

Abstract

The research aims to describe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the use of the Reportative Conditional in Brazilian Portuguese as a way to express viewpoint and perspective by adopting a cognitive approach, once the speaker, when reporting something, does not express his or her own cognitive material, but passes on that of others, as stated by Hattnher (2018). 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, besides temporal and modal values, may express evidentiality. Hengeveld and Hattnher (2015) propose an evidential typology that describes the reportative subtype, which includes evidential cases in which the speaker passes on information coming from other people. Therefore, based on a corpus composed of political speeches from the Brazilian National Congress (Chamber of Deputies and Federal Senate), during the research internship at the KU Leuven, where, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. María Sol Sansiñena, the qualitative analysis proposed in this project would be carried out. Professor Sansiñena is a specialist in the functional and cognitive approach, the perspective adopted in this study, and has worked mainly with the expression of conditionality and future forms in Spanish, as well as with evidential and modal meaning, which is directly related to the phenomenon analyzed in this research. (AU)