A análise funcionalista e o estabelecimento de quadros categoriais na gramática

Committed to a functionalist view of grammar, this study takes word classes as its object of analysis, aiming to show that categorical rigidity cannot be upheld in linguistic use. The analysis sample presented starts from the solutions of dictionaries in the registration of word classes parts and from the fluidity that these classes show in their use. Aspects of grammaticalization in Portuguese language are taken as evidence. It is argued that the grammatical organization of language has properties that support categorical shift processes, however singular they may seem to examination.

Localizando o pretérito perfecto compuesto na linha do tempo: o estágio da gramaticalização do PPC nas variedades diatópicas argentinas

The aim of this study was to observe Argentine diatopic varieties and to identify in which stage of the evolution of the pretérito perfecto compuesto (PPC) the use of compound tense fits into these variations. Therefore, we assume as assumptions (I) some authors` description of the evolutionary stages of this verb tense in Spanish, (II) the description of the values assigned to the perfecto compuesto in the dialect regions of Argentina and (III) the contributions of studies on grammaticalization for the verb tenses analysis.

As construções verbais paratáticas: gramaticalização em português europeu

This paper aims to analyze the so-called paratactic verbal constructions, or PVCs, in contemporary European Portuguese. The PVCs are built from the cohesion of two inflected verbs, V1 and V2, connected or not by the conjunction e (and), and only the second verb retains its full semantic content. Our analysis follows the grammaticalization and functional linguistics approaches. The process of grammaticalization of the PVCs allowed the verbs ir (go), chegar (arrive), pegar (take) and agarrar (grab), in specific contexts such as the PVCs, to undergo changes in their morphosyntactic and semantic features, what leads its categorial status and its function to change.

Gramaticalização e tradição discursiva: um estudo dos processos constitutivos do texto relacionados a assim

This paper is focused in a qualitative analysis on the item assim in correlation to its topic function in Tradições Discursivas (Discursive Traditions), investigated in the from 18th to 21th centuries. The results point out to a close relation between the investigated texts traditions and the changes that have occured concerning the item mentioned above, from a historical conception of non-linear diachrony.

Um enfoque diacrônico de assim no domínio da junção

This study proposes, based on Halliday (1985) and Raible (1992, 2001), that the interpropositional patterns of assim are distributed in continuum, which is set among the representative usages of different types of interdependency, starting from the examples of domination relations of parataxis up to the examples of hypotatics, passing through the ones that are between the poles of the continuum. We will exemplify this paperwork starting from the functioning of the phrase assim que, describing its syntactic and semantic behavior in the selected corpus and in an evidence analysis of the linguistic changing process through grammaticalization, which infers its functioning as a secular connector in order to indicate its position held by this pattern in the continuum.

Trajetórias de mudança dos predicados acabar, acontecer e começar sob perspectiva discursivo-funcional

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

As construções verbais paratáticas: gramaticalização em italiano

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Um estudo sobre os diferentes valores modais do verbo 'poder' em entrevistas jornalísticas do espanhol

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Passives without actives: evidence from verbless complement clauses in Spanish

This paper proposes a constructionist analysis à la Goldberg (1995, 2003, 2006) of passive verbless configurations in Spanish lacking a felicitous active counterpart.Under the paradigmatic – rather than syntagmatic – view of passives invoked in this paper, configurations of the type in (1) above, attested with a number of verba cogitandi et dicendi, are handled as instances of the Impersonal Subjective-Transitive construction, whose general skeletal meaning is X (NP1) attributed Y (XPCOMP) by Z (NP2) in a direct, categorical way. Moreover, the analysis proposed here also provides a satisfactory account of the distribution of grammatical subjects and the XPCOMPs, while also capturing the commonalities with “regular” passives (i.e. those with a felicitous active counterpart). In addition, Spanish passive verbless complement configurations with se dice (‘is said’) are shown to illustrate a three-point continuum consisting of (i) non-grammaticalized configurations with an active counterpart, (ii) non-grammaticalized configurations without an active counterpart, and (iii) grammaticalized configurations without an active counterpart. From a synchronic point of view, the structural and semantico-pragmatic properties exhibited by the lower-level lo que se dice XPFOCUS construction, involving a focusing/emphasizer subjunct function (e.g. verdaderamente ‘really’) as well as a reformulatory connective use (e.g. o sea ‘that is’, en otras palabras ‘in other words’) appear to point to an early process of grammaticalization, exhibiting decategorialization as well as generalization of meaning in conjunction with a prominent increase in pragmatic function and subjectification (cf. Traugott 1988, 1995a, 1995b, 2003).

Semantic change and intersubjectification: The origin of reprise evidential conditional in Old Catalan

The reprise evidential conditional (REC) is nowadays not very usual in Catalan: it is restricted to journalistic language and to some very formal genres (such as academic or legal language), it is not present in spontaneous discourse. On the one hand, it has been described among the rather new modality values of the conditional. On the other, the normative tradition tended to reject it for being a gallicism, or to describe it as an unsuitable neologism. Thanks to the extraction from text corpora, we surprisingly find this REC in Catalan from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the contemporary age, with semantic and pragmatic nuances and different evidence of grammaticalization. Due to the current interest in evidentiality, the REC has been widely studied in French, Italian and Portuguese, focusing mainly on its contemporary uses and not so intensively on the diachronic process that could explain the origin of this value. In line with this research, that we initiated studying the epistemic and evidential future in Catalan, our aim is to describe: a) the pragmatic context that could have been the initial point of the REC in the thirteenth century, before we find indisputable attestations of this use; b) the path of semantic change followed by the conditional from a ‘future in the past’ tense to the acquisition of epistemic and evidential values; and c) the role played by invited inferences, subjectification and intersubjectification in this change.

Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns

This paper proposes a diachronic typology for the various patterns that have been referred to as Hierarchical Alignment or Inverse Alignment. Previous typological studies have tried to explain such patterns as grammatical reflections of a universal Referential Hierarchy, in which first person outranks second person outranks third person and humans outrank other animates outrank inanimates. However, our study shows that most of the formal properties of hierarchy-sensitive constructions are essentially predictable from their historical sources. We have identified three sources for hierarchical person marking, three for direction marking, two for obviative case marking, and one for hierarchical constituent ordering. These sources suggest that there is more than one explanation for hierarchical alignment: one is consistent with Givón’s claim that hierarchical patterns are a grammaticalization of generic topicality; another is consistent with DeLancey’s claim that hierarchies reflect the deictic distinction between present (1/2) and distant (3) participants; another is simply a new manifestation of a common asymmetrical pattern, the use of zero marking for third persons. More importantly, the evolution of hierarchical grammatical patterns does not reflect a consistent universal ranking of participants – at least in those cases where we can see (or infer) historical stages in the evolution of these properties, different historical stages appear to reflect different hierarchical rankings of participants, especially first and second person. This leads us to conclude that the diversity of hierarchical patterns is an artifact of grammatical change, and that in general, the presence of hierarchical patterns in synchronic grammars is not somehow conditioned by some more general universal hierarchy.

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Mode of access: Internet.

Indefinite determiner introducing definite referent: a special use of 'yi 'one' + classifier' in Chinese

The indefinite determiner yi 'one'+ classifier' is the most approximate to an indefinite article, like the English a, in Chinese. It serves all the functions characteristic of representative stages of grammaticalization from a numeral to a generalized indefinite determiner as elaborated in the literature. It is established in this paper that the Chinese indefinite determiner has developed a special use with definite expressions, serving as a backgrounding device marking entities as of low thematic importance and unlikely to receive subsequent mentions in ensuing discourse. 'yi+ classifier' in the special use with definite expressions displays striking similarities in terms of semantic bleaching and phonological reduction with the same determiner at the advanced stage of grammaticalization characterized by uses with generics, nonspecifics and nonreferentials. An explanation is offered in terms of an implicational relation between nonreferentiality and low thematic importance which characterize the two uses of the indefinite determiner. While providing another piece of evidence in support of the claim that semantically nonreferentials and entities of low thematic importance tend to be encoded in terms of same linguistic devices in language, findings in this paper have shown how an indefinite determiner can undergo a higher degree of grammaticalization than has been reported in the literature-it expands its scope to mark not only indefinite but also definite expressions as semantically nonreferential and/or thematically unimportant. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Venir de (+ infinitive):an immediate anteriority marker in French

This paper deals with the grammaticalization of venir into aspectual auxiliary of immediate anteriority, against the traditional approach (Gougenheim 1929/1971) according to which venir de + inf., would express recent past and so would be a temporal auxiliary. On the basis of the (revised) Reichenbachian model, it shows that venir de + inf. bears upon the relationship between R and E (aspect) and not on the relationship between R and S (time). This analysis allows explain why venir, in this periphrasis, is defective (i.e. why venir cannot be conjugated in the passé simple or in any compound tense).

A vueltas con la naturaleza del cambio fonético-fonológico: los casos de Nj y Lj

Las etapas del cambio fonético-fonológico han sido descritas desde hace décadas, especialmente desde un punto de vista articulatorio y casi siempre partiendo de los testimonios escritos de que se podía disponer. No obstante, recientemente han ido surgiendo nuevas teorías que defienden que el cambio puede ser explicado a través del estudio de la variación y los procesos fonéticos propios del habla actual, puesto que ambos están relacionados con fenómenos de hipo (e hiper) articulación y, a la postre, de coarticulación. Una de ellas es la Fonología Evolutiva (Blevins 2004), aun cuando no ofrece una explicación satisfactoria para la difusión del cambio. En este estudio, se ha recurrido a estas teorías para esclarecer las causas de la evolución de dos contextos de yod segunda: /nj/ y /lj/, que llevaron a la fonologización de // y //, en un primer estadio de la historia del español.