The development of concessive markers in the history of Portuguese: the case of volitive sources

• Grant number: 24/06277-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Historical Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Sanderléia Roberta Longhin
• Grantee: João Pedro Cavalcante Frontera
• Supervisor: Marco Mazzoleni
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Università Di Bologna, Campus Di Forlì, Italy
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/00612-8 - Cyclical Changes in the History of Portuguese: From volition to concessivity, BP.MS

Abstract

This research project investigates the emergence of the concessive meaning in complex clause constructions involving two Portuguese conjunctions - como quer que and embora - which have in common a volitive lexical source and had the function of concession markers during distinct stages of Portuguese. Como quer que was one of the most frequent connectives in Archaic Portuguese, its frequency declined during the XVI century, the connective embora emerges in Classical Portuguese and remains as one of the most versatile and frequent concessive conjunctions in Portuguese. The research has been conducted within the theoretical framework of Grammaticalization (HEINE; KUTEVA, 2007; BYBEE, 2010, 2015; HEINE; NARROG, 2015; NARROG; HEINE, 2021), which posits the 'context-induced reinterpretation', an adequate instrument to describe stages of diachronic change. The main objective of this research project is to clarify for both constructions the relation between source and target meaning, considering the role of the source's conceptual meaning, the role of the contexts of use as guides that allow inferences and the particularity of the concessive target meaning. The research is based on a diachronic sample and conjoins quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches.