Analysis of different subtypes of "se ao menos" insubordinate constructions: a constructional typological proposal

• Grant number: 24/08629-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Effective date (Start): September 18, 2024
• Effective date (End): February 01, 2025
• 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: 23/08945-6 - The expression of desiderative values in "if only" insubordinate conditional constructions from a cognitive constructional point of view, BP.MS

Abstract

This project seeks to analyze the subtypes of the insubordinate conditional constructions headed by "se ao menos'' that, unlike those in which the main clause is expressed, have specific pragmatic functions and uses, namely the expression of wishes. This project proposes the analysis of the verbs that appear with each of the subtypes found in the corpus of insubordinate conditional constructions with "se ao menos" and their relationship with the expressed meaning. When talking about subtypes, we take under consideration the work of D'Hertefelt (2015) in which the author proposes different degrees of desirability (potential, irrealis and counterfactual wishes) that are expressed by this construction in six different Germanic Languages. This difference is expressed by some combinations of verb tense and mood. In Brazilian Portuguese (BP) it seems that we do have some sort of different degrees of (im)possibility of realization of the expressed wishes, but according to the corpus investigated here, we do not have the same formal markings as found by D'Hertefelt (2015) when working with Germanic Languages. So, the research proposed here aims to investigate how the different degrees of desirability are formally marked in BP, following the hypothesis that the semantics of the main verb would point out this differentiation. Thus, following the framework of Cognitive Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), considering that a construction is a pairing of form and meaning, this tendency is being investigated through a collostructional analysis and a cluster analysis, Corpus Linguistics approaches that aim to discover which lexical items co-occur inside a given construction and how they can be grouped together in meaningful clusters that help us semantically describe the studied construction. This task 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. The group coordinated by her at Ghent University also has members that employ the Cluster Analysis on Linguistics investigations, a very interesting opportunity to discuss and learn from researchers abroad how to successfully employ this kind of investigation in BP.