De “(o) que é feito de” a “cadê que”: a gramaticalização em cartas pessoais de cearenses ao longo do século XX

Abstract

The word "cadê" is widely used in Brazilian Portuguese. Its origin came from the grammaticalization suffered by the expression “O que é feito de”. The present article analyzes the passage from this expression to the discursive marker “cadê que” in the light of Functionalism. It uses a sample of 431 personal letters written throughout the 20th century by people who lived in the state of Ceará, Brazil. The analysis shows that, although the process of grammaticalization and agglutination of the expression began even in the sixteenth century, all its forms occur in the twentieth century letters, but the less grammaticalized form “o que é feito de” fell from use in the letters around the 1950s, while the most grammaticalized form “cadê que” appears only in letters of the 1990s.