A gramaticalização de geral no português brasileiro: de adjetivo a pronome indefinido/quantificador

Abstract

Grammaticalization is a process whereby grammatical forms are developed from lexical forms and forms even more grammatical are developed from forms already grammatical (KURYŁOWICZ, 1975[1965]; HOPPER; TRAUGOTT, 2003; HEINE; KUTEVA, 2005, among others). This paper describes the grammaticalization process that the adjective geral in Portuguese is going through. Based on the analysis of data extracted from Corpus do Português (DAVIES; FERREIRA, 2006) and from the social network Twitter, it is proposed that this adjective is used with an adverbial value in some contexts which it determines the verb and as an universal quantifier in contexts which it saturates the verbal predicate, whether in subject or object position. The evidences that attest to the grammaticalization process of this adjective include (i) extension, since it starts to occur in environments where it did not previously occur, (ii) desemantization, since it starts to convey a grammatical sense manly in its use as a quantifier, equivalent to the meaning of the indefinite pronoun todos, and (iii) decategorialization, since, in contexts where it is used in its grammatical form, it loses the property of number inflection. The proposed cline follow the direction of adjective > noun > adverb > indefinite pronoun/quantifier.