O item negócio em cartas de língua portuguesa seiscentista

Abstract

The main goal of this dissertation is to present to the academic community the linguistic behavior in the morphological and syntactic spheres of negócio in a seventeenth-century Portuguese corpus, in order to propose a semantic classification of the term, through the comprehension of the class of General Nouns (GNs). Therefore, a literature review was conducted to elucidate the process of formation of this morphological class, which is still being explored within the field of Variational Linguistics. GNs, nouns that have lost semantic content, is an intermediate category between lexical and grammatical items that should be associated with the processes of Grammaticalization and Pronominalization. The reader will encounter some adjacent theories, but will also have a deeper understanding of the function of the negócio linguistic phenomenon in 17th-century documents, such as the theory of Reference and Prototype. The description of the phenomenon came from two sub-corpora composed of commercial letters, one corpus consisted of letters written by Marquis of Gouveia, and the other included letters from Father Antonio Vieira. The textual genre of the commercial letters was considered in its dialogical aspect, its functions, and its socio-communicative particularities, in the light of historical sociolinguistics. Thus, based on the contexts of the negócio item, in accordance with the discursive characteristics of the letters, its analysis became feasible in the compiled corpus, distributing such occurrences among [+specific], [+generic] and [+ambiguous] semantic groups. It was possible to verify that most of the occurrences present a more general meaning in the analyzed letters, confirming the hypothesis that in the 17th century negócio was already used as a general noun. The function of this item as NG is similar to that of pronouns, since it covers greater referential capacity. Other semantic-textual properties have also been identified and compared with studies done about item's linguistic behavior in Latin and Portuguese in the 18th and 21st centuries.