Mapeamento de microconstruções com assim

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to investigate constructional patterns with assim, from the perspective of the Usage-based theory and the constructional approach to change (Bybee, 2010; Furtado da Cunha et al., 2013; Rosário; Traugott; Trousdale, 2013; Oliveira, 2016), which advocates that “any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist” (Goldberg, 2006). In this way, there is a close relationship between the use that speakers make of the language, in real situations of communicative interaction, and linguistic coding. Thus, we assume the following initial hypotheses: i) constructions with assim are instantiated in the language from more abstract hierarchical levels; ii) there is a semantic-pragmatic expansion of its uses, and it is related to an increase of intersubjectivity; iii) different microconstructional patterns with assim present productivity in the different modalities of language use – oral and written. In this sense, in order to fulfill the proposed general objective, we have specific objectives (i) to identify the constructional patterns in the analyzed corpora; (ii) to describe the formal and functional characteristics of the identified microconstructional patterns with assim. Data analysis is based on the mixed method, in terms of Cunha Lacerda (2016), which is based on the survey of the frequency of use and the description of occurrences of the constructional patterns analyzed. To do this, we use two synchronous corpora, one of which is representative of the written modality, which is composed of data from the social platform X, formerly Twitter, whose samples represent the years of 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, compiled by Martins (2021). The representative corpus of the oral modality, which is composed by videos posted on the YouTube platform, referent to interview gender, from videos dated between 2023 and 2024. The results, based on the analyzed data, allow the identification of twenty-one microconstructional patterns with assim, which result from a process of grammatical constructionalization based on the instantiation of increasingly intersubjective constructions, from a more general scheme, whose basic function is the phoricity of assim.