Os modificadores lexicais do sintagma nominal no português brasileiro contemporâneo: uma análise baseada na Gramática Discursivo-Funcional

Abstract

The thesis The lexical modifiers of the noun phrase in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese: an analysis based on the Functional Discourse Grammar has the general objective of analyzing the morphosyntactic coding of lexical modifiers in the Noun Phrase in contemporary written Brazilian Portuguese, having in mind the motivations of interpersonal (pragmatic), representational (semantic) and morphosyntactic levels. With theoretical support in linguistic Functionalism, more specifically in the Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), we assumed the hypothesis that, in the morphosyntactic coding of the lexical modifiers in the Noun Phrase in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, we identify alignments of representational and interpersonal nature to the position of the lexical modifier relative to the nucleus and the proximity of the modifier to the nucleus, in the case of more than one lexical modifier. Using a corpus constituted from the Data Bank at the Lexicographic Studies Center of the Faculty of Sciences and Letters, UNESP Campus of Araraquara-SP, the research seeks, in its development, answers to the following questions: Are there categorial boundary indeterminations between operators and modifiers of layers in the morphosyntactic coding of the Noun Phrase? What alignments exist for the position of the lexical modifier relative to the nucleus of the Noun Phrase? Are there representational alignments regarding the proximity of the modifier to the nucleus in cases of existence of more than one lexical modifier in the Noun Phrase? The research reveals that, in the data, there are boundary indeterminations between operators (grammatical) and modifiers (lexical), with respect to the semantic domains of Quantity and Time, of the Representational Level, in the sense that modifiers of these domains tend to position to the left of the nucleus. In addition, it confirmed that there are interpersonal and representational alignments for the position of the lexical modifier in relation to the nucleus of the Noun Phrase. The hypothesis was also confirmed that, through a principle of Iconicity, there is representational alignment for the proximity of the lexical modifier to the nucleus in cases of existence of more than one lexical modifier in the Noun Phrase, so that there tends to be direct proportionality between the greater semantic proximity between modifier and nucleus and the greater formal proximity between them.