The diachronic pathway of interrogative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese: the grammaticalization of o que and other changes

• Grant number: 24/08111-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Historical Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves
• Grantee: Vitor Morelli Silva
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From a diachronic perspective and in the generative grammar framework (diachronic syntax), this research investigates the grammaticalization process of o que in Brazilian Portuguese and its effects based on its emergence in interrogative clauses, comparing it with what happened in Portugal and with the use of el qué and lo qué in Spanish (Eguren; Sánchez Lopez, 2023). In Portuguese, the grammaticalization consists in the junction between the determinant o and the relative pronoun que, which begins to function as an interrogative pronoun. The realization of o que in direct interrogative pronouns since the 18th century (Silva, 2022) can be seen as an effect of this process. In addition, the constructions wh + que and wh + é que in Brazilian Portuguese and their dynamics in the data will also be discussed in the light of Mioto and Figueiredo Silva (1995). This inquiry will make use of the available data in the Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese (Galves et al., 2017) and in the P. S. Post Scriptum Corpus (CLUL, 2014), therefore obtaining data from Classical Portuguese, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese. To obtain the data, syntactic queries will be run in the Corpus Search software (Randall, 2004) and the Tycho Brahe Platform (Veronesi; Galves, 2024). (AU)