Gramaticalização e Preposições Complexas do Português: um estudo baseado em corpus

Abstract

The present dissertation introduces a study which applies the theory of Grammaticalization to a digital diachronic corpus, with a view to mapping some of the changes which have taken place in certain structures of Portuguese, the so-called prepositional phrases . The objectives of the research were threefold. First, the study aimed at investigating the complex prepositions em face de, em face a, face a, em vista de, em frente de, em frente a e frente a, in order to understand their syntactic and semantic development and, in turn, to evaluate whether they are undergoing a process of grammaticalization. Secondly, the study sought to examine texts from a variety of historical periods, so as to map a possible trajectory taken by the afore mentioned forms between the 14th and the 20th centuries. Thirdly, the study intended to verify whether the items frente a e face a may be considered reductions of em frente a and em face a, respectively. The theoretical framework for the study has been taken from Grammaticalization, a theory which explains phenomena which affect linguistic items. The process of grammaticalization may consists in one item, lexical or grammatical, becoming more grammatical. The triggering factor in this case is said to be the frequency of use. Corpus Linguistics has provided a methodology for the compilation, extraction and treatment of the textual data in this dissertation. Similarly to Hoffman (2005) the investigation here was based on electronic corpora. The study corpus was the Corpus do Português, which consists of texts in Portuguese, written between the 14th and the 20th century, available at http://www.corpusdoportugues.org/. The study suggests that the complex prepositions analysed have become increasingly grammaticalised, because they have acquired additional abstract meanings. It has also been observed that, in many ways, these abstract meanings coexist as layers. However, there seems to be a tendency for one form to become the preferred way of expressing each of these new meanings