Um estudo da multifuncionalidade da forma feito no português contemporâneo

Abstract

This dissertation is dedicated to presenting a comparative study of the multifunctionality of the form "feito" in Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) varieties. Based on a synchronic perspective, it sought to capture and describe the linguistic patterns of the uses of "feito," in order to identify its functional shifts in contemporary usage and to verify if the process of change in the form has occurred similarly in BP and EP. The hypothesis was that the form "feito," typically verbal (past participle of the verb "fazer"), through the communicative needs of speakers, has expanded its functions to other linguistic categories, resulting in polysemy, specifically heterosemy, at the lexical level. Additionally, two other hypotheses were explored: (i) the adjectival function of the form would be the most productive and (ii) the conjunctive function would not be restricted to the Brazilian variety. The theoretical framework adopted is functionalist, primarily based on studies by Neves (2001, 2006, 2011a, 2011b [2000], 2018a, 2018b). From an epistemological point of view, this research falls under the line of Variation and Language Change studies and is characterized as qualitative-quantitative in nature. To constitute the linguistic sample, 1200 occurrences were taken from the Corpus of Portuguese (DAVIES; FERREIRA, 2006). The data were collected from two interfaces of this database - "Genre/Historical" (20th century) and "Web/Dialects" (21st century) - and analyzed based on a set of criteria. The results confirmed that feito performs other functions beyond its prototypical one: noun, adjective, adverbial phrase (as an integral part of a phrase), interjection phrase (as an integral part of an interjection) and comparative conjunctive (subjunctive). This multifunctionality is similar in the two varieties of Portuguese analyzed, distinguishing, in fact, in the conjunctive use, which proved to be more productive in BP.