Construcionalização e mapeamento pancrônico da construção de informalidade e intensificação [MóX]

Abstract

This paper is based on the following general goal: to map, analyze and describe the formal and functional aspects of the comparative adjective 'maior' (and variants) and the particle 'mó' followed by the elements modified by them, in order to testify the hypothesis that synchronic expressions of the type 'MóX' are, in fact, instances of a new construction in BP, the Informality and Intensification [MóX] Construction, or [MóX] construction. To this end, we rely on Usagee-Based Functional Linguistics (GOLDBERG, 2006; CROFT, 2001; HILPERT, 2014; PEREK, 2015; BYBEE, 2016, 2020; TRAUGOTT and TROUSDALE, 2013) and Usage-Based Construction Grammar. In terms of specific goals, we set seven of them: (i) to perform a formal and functional description of 'maior' in Latin, 'maior' ~ 'maor' ~ 'mor' in Galician-Portuguese and 'mor' in 20th century Portuguese by means of data from The Latin Library platform, the Universo Cantigas portal and the Corpus do Português, respectively; (ii) describe the formal and functional properties of the [MóX] construction in 21st century BP, from data extracted from Twitter, based on Marcuschi (2007) and Foltran and Nóbrega (2016); (iii) combine the analyses performed in the previous items, resulting in a panchronic analysis; (iv) control the factors: phonetic integrity, vocabular ordering, presence/absence of determiners, types of X, semantics of the construction and degree of formality; (v) understand the communicative intentions behind the uses of the [MóX] construction in the light of Silva (2008); (vi) verify the possible collocational constraints of possible subschemes of the [MóX] construction and (vii) propose a constructional [MóX] network in 21st century BP. As for the results, we found that the [MóX] construction undergoes a series of changes both in form (phonetic reduction, nominal pre-fixation, host class expansion) and in meaning/function (fixation of the intensifying sense and specialization of the pragmatic sense of informality) and we observed the existence of microconstructions more emancipated such „mó saudade‟, „mó legal‟, which are stored in memory due to the high frequency of use. Thus, we prove that the Informality and Intensification [MóX] Construction is the result of a process of constructionalization in BP and that it is in a process of expansion, thus being a versatile structure with high productivity.