Um estudo diacrônico da multifuncionalidade da forma PARA no português brasileiro

Abstract

This research presents a diachronic study of the multifunctionality of the form para in Brazilian Portuguese through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Considering that this form had already undergone and still under goes the process of linguistic changing, and that it also had worked in the past as an adverb and in the period under study it works as preposition (She went to São Paulo) and as an introducer of conjunctive phrase para que (in order to), in the role of conjunction (She studied in order to obtain approval), we carried out a qualitative and quantitative research, which was theoretically supported in the assumptions of functionalist linguistics, historical grammar, cognitive linguistics and in the grammaticalization parameters proposed by Heine et al. (1991). Our corpus was composed of 300 occurrences of the form in analysis which were collected from the database named Corpus do Português (www.corpusdoportugues.org).We start from the hypothesis that, due its origin in Latin, the form para would be more productive as preposition, since the conjunction is an extension of the prepositional function. Furthermore, we have expected that in the category of preposition the form para would be more frequent in complementation contexts (verbal or nominal) than in adjunction environments whose relations would transcend the displacement in space, which is its primitive sense. We have analyzed the multifunctionality of para based on morphosyntatic and semantic criteria and we have compared the data to the grammaticalization principles proposed by Heine et al. (1991). The obtained results have proved that the multifunctionality of the form para comes from the expansion of its usage as preposition whose greatest productivity is in the complementation contexts. The analysis also has pointed out that these contexts are environments more grammaticalized than the ones of adjunction, beyond that the competition between para and the other prepositions as a, de and em is conditioned by greater semantic emptying of the prepositions and, therefore, it is more likely to occur in contexts more grammaticalized.