As construções partitivas em português: dessa água beberemos

Abstract

Partitivity, which expresses the relationship between a subset and a larger set, is a topic that has been little explored in the Portuguese language. This research, based on a cognitive-functional approach, aims to investigate partitive constructions in contemporary Portuguese in order to characterize them formally, semantically, and pragmatically. To this end, it used a corpus of 10,000 tweets, Portuguese Tweets for Sentiment Analysis (Kaggle), from which it collected 690 occurrences. The analysis revealed the following results: (a) adnominal partitive constructions predominate over adverbal ones; (b) nominal phrase 1 is characterized by being an indefinite singular noun; (c) nominal phrase 2 is characterized by being a definite singular noun that represents an inanimate and evoked entity; (d) adverbal partitives are characterized by predominantly presenting a relational process verb; (e) the information-status of the nominal phrases of the partitives is most frequently given; (f) constructions with a sense of extraction and qualitative emphasis are the most prototypical, and those with a sense of totality are the least prototypical. These results show the contribution of this study to the description of partitive constructions in Portuguese based on real data.