Padrões microconstrucionais de marcadores discursivos focalizadores das línguas portuguesa, espanhola, francesa e inglesa

Abstract

This thesis aims to describe microconstructional patterns of discourse markers – hereinafter, MDs – focusing in the Portuguese, Spanish, French and English languages, which are formed by verbs – mainly those that denote perception – and a focusing element – such as adverbs, locatives and pronouns. We start from the hypothesis that the MDs analyzed – which would configure new pairings of form and meaning, arising from use –, although they belong to different languages, would share similar domain-general cognitive processes in their instantiation. As a theoretical contribution, in this work we assume the fundamental assumptions of Use-Centered Functional (Bybee, 2010; Furtado da Cunha et al., 2013; Rosário; Oliveira, 2016; Bispo; Silva, 2016) and the constructional approach to change (Traugott; Trousdale, 2013), which, based on Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1996; 2006), predicts that construction is the basic unit of language and that new pairs of form and meaning begin to compose the grammar based on use, forming new patterns and new nodes that are organized into constructional networks in a hierarchical manner. In order to fulfill the proposed objective, the data analyzed were taken from a current synchronic oral corpus, consisting of videos posted on the YouTube platform, belonging to the vlog genre and made by native speakers of the four aforementioned languages. This corpus consists of two hours of video for each language, covering samples between the years 2019 and 2022, with 165 occurrences in total. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis, in the terms assumed by Cunha Lacerda (2016), the data collected for this thesis point to that DMs function in the four languages as discourse interpretation guides (Brinton, 2017), drawing the interlocutor's attention to points considered relevant in the discursive game, in order to create favorable conditions for implicatures and situated interpretations and in order to indicate the way in which the interlocutor must conceptualize the discourse that is taking place, establishing a cognitive space of joint attention (Diessel, 2019). Another relevant aspect is related to the degree of intersubjectivity that the MDs analyzed present, varying according to the form and function performed in the context of use.