O estatuto conceitual e funcional das proformas. Pronome: protótipo das proformas

Abstract

This thesis, predominantly theoretical, postulates that the natural linguistic systems tend to regularization demonstrable through prototypical forms, categories, classes and functions. The representative forms of categorical properties prototypicality are built by means of user-determined choices of language communities. These choices settle down or sediment on the basis of usage frequency. The more often a given form is used, the greater the possibility of stressed grammaticalization, with the loss of phonic mass and the morphologicalization with germane repercussions to the categorical status in relationship to the language paradigms. The grammatical codification of each and every categorical property (number, person, size, gender, tense, mood, voice, and so on), as well as the word classes, is, in the last analysis, construed on the basis of the use. The fundamental proposition of this thesis is the claim for a new category, proformality, in pursuit of reconfiguring the word classes, in such a way the reordination considers four word macroclasses, to wit: nouns (substantives, adjectives, numerals); verbs; adverbs; and relational elements (prepositional and conjunctional connectors). This category affects not only the subclasses of the above mentioned macroclasses but also the intralexical morphemes codifying the referred categorical properties, with the admission of a interclass and intraclass moving as a consequence of the incidence of grammaticalization processes. The theoretical support is constituted by the confrontation of epistemological models, with the final option for an amalgam of Aristothelic and prototypical theses; by the exposition on the grammaticalization processes nature, with the assumption that lexicon and grammar are differentiated sections by virtue of the grammaticality status; by the admission of the evolutionary hypothesis to explain the movements of grammaticalization of codifications of bigger transparence (referential concreteness) and exophoric codifications to strictly intralinguistic functions. Along of that theoretical exposition, which confronts traditional theses without disregarding its relative profit, illustrative analyses of samples taken from the concrete use of Portuguese language (collected from www.corpusdoportugues.org and other internet sites) are undertaken aiming to found minimally the fundamental reason of this thesis. Thus, this proposition of classification gradates the word macroclasses in two macrogroups, named pleriforms and proforms, which are distinguished on the basis of the manifestation more or less stressed of proformality category. This category accounts for the fusion of pragmatic, cognitive and linguistic concepts in order to explain the prototypicality of forms related to classes, subclasses and intralexical morphemes as model items of their correspondent paradigms.Its exemplarity comes from the conservation of minimal semantic features at the bottom of each class, subclass and intralexical morphemic paradigm, in such a way a proform can perform a suppletive function with large-scale frequency, even though not absolute, or represent prototypically all of the members of its class, subclass or intralexical morphemic paradigm. The comprehension that the processes of variation and linguistic change, especially grammaticalization, accounts for categorical fluidity led us to produce scales of continua inside several proformal macroclasses, aiming to exemplify the movement inside the same class and among the different classes with different degrees of grammaticality ( to do that, one observes factors of morphological, syntactic and semantic factors). In other terms, the elaboration of scales aims to illustrate that the status of grammaticality of available pleri- and proforms to any kind of linguistic codification can vary among the classes, the subclasses of the same class, the intralexical morphemes and syntactic-semantic functions. So inside each pleri- and proformal macroclass, inside its subclasses and inside its constitutive categorical properties, forms present different levels of grammaticality on the basis of its greater, lesser or multiple membership, respectively, on macroclasses, subclasses, greater or lesser morphological expression of a categorical property. Therefore, the disputes among lexicon and grammar, conditioned by cognitive and pragmatic factors, occur inside the classes, the subclasses and the intralexical morphemes codifying categorical properties. Finally this thesis pays tribute to the tradition since it has paid attention, one way or the other, to the propension of linguistic systems to put forward, in a periodically remolded way, the more generic counterpart of each macroclass, subclass and intralexical morphemes. However, this understanding has been strictly or mainly reflected and subsumed to the so called pronominal class. That is the reason why it is justifiable the consideration that pronouns are the prototypes of proforms, that is, they are their typical exemplars or their better representatives.