O percurso de gramaticalização de é que: um estudo pancrônico

Abstract

The increasing use of the expression é que, considered “expletive,” both in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese is conspicuous. Nevertheless, there are divergences among linguists in relation to its origin, nature, and function. This work is a report of an empirical investigation of the multifunctional feature of é que, aiming at describing and explaining its different uses, origins, processes and mechanisms, as well as the formal and functional properties that characterize the emergence of this expression as relative to a grammaticalization process. Within the functionalist paradigm, by which grammaticalization is sheltered, this research panchronically analyzes sample data of the Corpus Mínimo de Textos Escritos da Língua Portuguesa – COMTELPO, that gathers Portuguese texts from the 12th to 18th centuries, and texts of the first and second halves of the 19th and 20th centuries in Brazilian and European Portuguese, which were classified according to genre and period of the Portuguese language. The SPSS program was used for frequency calculation and correlation of evidences. The empirical results seem to prove the hypothesis that through a process of grammaticalization, é que follows the path space > text, moving from more concrete meanings to more abstract ones within the text, resulting from the reanalysis of the original, 13th-century transition from é o que to é que. In relation to the emergence of the expression, the first occurrence of é que in initial position was registered in the data of the 16th-century sample. The expression é que starts to occur in middle position of declarative statements and exclamations in the 17th century, and only in the first half of the 19th century, it occurs in interrogative sentences. Once this pathway was established, the data analysis that refers to the synchronizations of the 19th and 20th centuries reveal that the expression é que accumulates the function of emphasis marker and epystemic asseveration marker, and occurs through the types termed in this work as: emphatic-explicative marker, emphatic-contrastive marker, and emphatic-interrogative marker.