Posposição de demonstrativos em português e em espanhol: estudo histórico e comparado das estruturas articuladas e não-articuladas e não-articuladas

Abstract

In order to better understand the existing asymmetries between romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, this work displays a comparative study of Portuguese demonstrative pronouns (este, esse, aquele and their inflections) and the Spanish ones (este, ese, aquel and also their inflections) in postnominal position. I was able to identify two kinds of structure. The first, exclusive of Spanish, appears with a definite article before a noun, and it is for that reason called posposition of the demonstrative with article; whereas the second kind is called posposition of the demonstrative without article, and it is present in both languages. Taking into consideration Givóns functional-typological analysis (2001) and Hopper & Traugotts concept of grammaticalization (1993), these structures were analyzed as grammaticalized constructions used in different discursive functions. Aiming at understanding these structures origins and their specific communicative functions throughout centuries, I carried out a corpora based synchronic and diachronic study, which classified occurrences in terms of morphosintatics, semantics and discursive pragmatics from the Corpus do Português and Corpus del Español, both created by Mark Davies. The use of Givóns discursive-pragmatic analysis measured by Referential Distance (RD) (1992) pointed out a considerable difference between these two structures. The posposition with article has greater RD value, consequently a lower degree of accessibility, the posposition without article has a lower RD value and a greater degree of accessibility.