Diachronic Study of the Discontinuous Noun Phrase in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This work has as its main objective to examine, from the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), which are the pragmatic, semantic and morphosyntactic motivations underlying the ordering of the constituents of the discontinuous Np in different synchronies of Brazilian Portuguese, in order to verify whether the synchronic characterization of the phenomenon has a diachronic basis and whether there are differences in the productivity of the phenomenon in speech and writing. The empirical analysis of the phenomenon is based on samples from different historical sources: (i) letters from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries from the Projeto Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB) and from the Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe; (ii) readers’ letters from the 21st century from the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Diário do Norte; and (iii) spoken language records from the 20th century, extracted from the minimum corpus of the NURC/Brazil, and from the 21st century, taken from the Iboruna database (Amostra Censo). The methodology includes analysis parameters of interpersonal (rhetorical and pragmatic functions of the Np constituents), representational (type of semantic entity designated by the head noun and the semantic relationship between the head and the displaced constituent) and morphosyntactic nature (morphosyntactic configuration of the Np constituents and structural weight of the displaced constituent). Based on the analyses, the conclusion is that the discontinuity in the structuring of the Np has a stable behavior over time and it is motivated by factors of a more pragmatic order rather than morphosyntactic.