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Part of
Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages
Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería and Shima Salameh Jiménez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 340] 2024
► pp. 261–289

Chapter 9
Constructional changes in Brazilian Portuguese in the 20th century

Two cases of linguistic deletion

 | Universidade Católica Portuguesa
This chapter analyzes two constructional changes by deletion of linguistic elements in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in the 20th century, namely, the null clitic se constructions (specifically, reflexive, reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive, and impersonal constructions) and the chopping relative construction, as two relevant manifestations of the recent standardization of the BP variety diverging from European Portuguese (EP). Based on a usage-feature and profile-based analysis and adopting a sociocognitive view of language, especially Cognitive Grammar, this study shows that the deletion of the clitic se conveys a shift to a nonenergetic, absolute construal of the event, and that the deletion of the preposition correlates with the grammaticalization of the relative pronoun que and highlights the accessibility of the nominal antecedent. Three contributions to research on language change are stressed: changes by deletion generate new constructions with their own meanings; synchronic constructional alternation, such as the one existing in BP between overt and null se constructions and the one already nonexistent in BP but existing in EP between pied-piping and chopping constructions, allows simulation of the diachronic constructional change in real time; and successful media from the mid-20th century onward, such as TV Globo for the huge Brazilian population, play a central role in language change and standardization.
Keywords: constructional change, standardization, Cognitive Grammar, construal, grammaticalization, ellipsis, se constructions, relative constructions, TV Globo, Portuguese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Portuguese and the standardization of Brazilian Portuguese: Between exonormative and endonormative standardization
  • 3.Constructional changes by deletion: Mere morphosyntactic deletion or emergence of new constructions?
  • 4.Clitic se deletion: Null se constructions
    • 4.1The alternation between overt and null se constructions
    • 4.2Changes in se constructions and the new null se construction
  • 5.The deletion of the preposition in relative clauses: The chopping construction
    • 5.1Three prepositional relative constructions
    • 5.2The alternation between pied-piping and chopping relative constructions
    • 5.3The conventionalization of the noncanonical chopping relative construction
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 5 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.340.09soa
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