CONSTRUÇÕES CONDICIONAIS INTRODUZIDAS POR "CASO" NO PORTUGUÊS DO BRASIL

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the conditional construction introduced by caso in contemporary brazilian portuguese considering that the conditionality relation constitutes a complex category in which covers a variety of forms that can express different meanings. The theoretical basis for this work is the functionalist theory of language allied to the cognitive linguistics contributions, which support our view that language should be treated in its actual, effective use as an instrument of communication in which the cultural, social and cognitive contexts influences significantly in the way the language is structured. It is believed that the construction introduced by caso has a specific characteristic and presents pragmatic, semantic and morphosyntactic differences, and therefore should not be evaluated as equivalent to the prototypical conditional construction of brazilian portuguese. Thus, the main objective of this dissertation is to show how the conditionality meaning in the constructions introduced by caso is constructed. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of the conditional constructs initiated by the caso, in order to allow its characterization for the brazilian portuguese and thus to verify the basic aspects that allow this construction can be considered as a member of the conditional category. For this, were selected as the criteria of analysis the parameters of the conditionality defined by Dancygier (1998) which are: (i) Causality, (ii) Non-assertiveness, (iii) Prediction, (iv) Epistemic distance and (v) Mental spaces. We evaluate, in addition to the parameters of the conditionality, formal parameters such as the conditional clause position in relation to the main clause, and the time and verbal mood of the construction. In this study, occurrences of contemporary Brazilian Portuguese were considered, collected in the database available online Corpus do Português (www.corpusdoportugues.org). The results confirm that, given the peculiarity of the caso connector, the meaning of condition is established in the constructions introduced by the caso in a specific scheme, distinguishing itself from the prototypical pattern in different points.