The expression of concessive meaning in Brazilian Portuguese: grammatical constructions in interface with cognitive systems

Abstract

This project belongs to a larger body of research being developed within the research group "Gramática de Usos do Português". In this project, we analyze the expression of concessive meaning considering the components of its semantic structure and the elements of syntactic structure aiming at providing an account to how the grammatical relations are held in the expression of such meaning, with the general hypothesis that the expression of concessivity can be explained according to human cognitive systems, such as force dynamics and attention (TALMY, 2000). Framed in the cognitive-functional area of linguistics, this project considers, in interface, the tenets of Croft's (1991, 1995, 2001, 2005, 2007) constructional (functional) grammar and Langacker's (1987, 1991, 1999, 2008, 2013) cognitive grammar, Talmy's (1988, 2000a, 2000b) conceptual semantics and Givón's (1989, 1995, 2002, 2005, 2010) (cognitive) functionalism. In line with the framework and the general hypothesis, the main goal of this research is to describe the linguistic constructions that instantiate concessive meaning. The general orientation is to explicate the interface between general cognitive systems involved in such instantiation and the linguistic expression of concessive meaning. The framework adopted in this study allows for grammatical constructions that instantiate concessive meaning, other than the conventionalized adverbial subordinate constructions, to be considered since they share and inherit semantic components of concessivity. The corpus used in this research is Corpus do Português and it is available online. Initial procedures implicate the collection of examples from the corpus of the constructions in analysis. From the start, these are the procedures to be followed: a) the establishment of pertinent factors to the analysis of constructions that instantiate concessive meaning; b) the interpretation of such functional and cognitive aspects of these constructions according to the factors raised. The interpretation of the results concerns the interconnectedness between human cognitive systems and the linguistic system by explicating language use relative to what is known about human cognition and the cognitive systems that organize human experience. In this way, the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components of language is analyzed in interface, like it is foreseen in the most basic Functionalist lessons (NEVES, 2006). (AU)