A correlação locução adjetiva/adjetivo: uma análise funcional

This research deals with the relationship locução adjetiva / adjective, focusing the reasons for using one form or the other one, in situations where the speaker has a choice between an adjective or a locução adjetiva virtually correspondent and vice versa. In general, the objective is to investigate the possibility of correlation between locução adjetiva and adjective, and to identify motivations for the use of one form or the other one. The theoretical support of this paper is the Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso (LFCU), which groups together theoretical and methodological assumptions of North American Functional Linguistics, represented by authors as Givón (1984), Bybee (2010), Traugott (2011), and Cognitive Linguistics, as developed by Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (2002). As regards the methodological procedures, this research is of qualitative and quantitative character: at first, we did the survey data in the texts that made up the corpus, followed by analysis of each them, especially the locução adjetiva, by considering the semantic, morphosyntactic, cognitive and pragmatic aspects. The corpus is composed of 36 texts, taken from 12 issues of the Veja magazine, published between January 2013 and March 2013. As for the results, in the case of locução adjetiva with related adjectives, this research has shown that the choice of former is due to semantic change, the use of lexicalized forms, to priming cases or to stylistic motivations. It means that the choices of one of these two forms go beyond lexical issues, since there are other motivations, such as syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ones.