O condicional evidencial reportativo em discursos políticos do português brasileiro: uma descrição cognitivista dos fenômenos de ponto de vista e perspectiva

Abstract

Based on well-established literature in other languages (Böhm; Hennemann, 2014; Dendale, 1993, 2010, 2012; Kronning, 2018; Oliveira, 2013; Squartini, 2001), Lourenço (2016) and Mella (2020) consider that the future in the past (futuro do pretérito) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a verbal form that can express not only temporal and modal semantic values in an utterance but also evidential ones. Since this value is much more related to the modal meanings of this verbal form than to the temporal ones (Câmara Jr., 1967, apud Freitag; Araujo, 2011), this study considers the term “conditional” (Dendale, 1993, 2010, 2012; Dendale; Coltier, 2013; Oliveira, 2013) more appropriate to refer to the object of this research: the reportative conditional (Kronning, 2012, 2018). Reportativity is an indirect way of obtaining information and, therefore, a type of evidentiality, characterized by borrowing the content from other sources (Kronning, 2018). By making this borrowing, the speaker automatically expresses the cognitive content of another individual in their utterance (Hattnher, 2018). With this premise in mind and based on the descriptions by Lourenço (2016) and Mella (2020), who attested to the conditional as a grammatical marker of evidentiality in BP, this study aims to (i) broaden the scope of analysis of the object and approach the reportative conditional not only as a functional phenomenon but also as a cognitive one, proposing to analyze it as a grammatical marker of viewpoint construction and perspective shift in discourse. Linguistic viewpoints are specific structures constructed by the speaker through various linguistic mechanisms, oriented toward a given discursive perspective (Dancygier, 2017). The main hypothesis is that the reportative conditional triggers the emergence of a viewpoint that alters the discourse perspective. This study also aims to (ii) contribute to the description of the conditional as a grammatical evidential marker in BP. To achieve this, it seeks to analyze, among other issues, the distribution of conditional occurrences across the considered uses, and, among the reportative ones, those in which the conditional is the only mechanism fulfilling this function in the utterance. Adopting the Cognitive-Functional Linguistics approach as its theoretical framework, to achieve these objectives, the research relied on a corpus compiled manually and composed of records from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, available on the respective websites of the Legislative Houses. The conditional occurrences were collected using the R Platform (R Core Team, 2023), based on the suffixes of the verbal form, and classified according to their use in each context, following Dendale (2010) and Vatrican (2013, 2014). Those that allowed for a reportative reading were analyzed according to (i) the person and number of the verbal subject and (ii) the verbal form (synthetic or periphrastic), which are morphosyntactic parameters, as well as in relation to the characteristics of (iii) the information source, a semantic-pragmatic parameter. Based on the theoretical assumptions by Kronning (2018) regarding the reportative conditional, the analysis of these parameters yielded results that contributed to elucidating the characterization of this phenomenon in BP. For its treatment as a grammatical marker of construction and shift in discourse phenomena related to viewpoint and perspective in this language, the study analyzed the interaction between grammatical structure and discursive context (Zeman, 2019) and the distinction between deixis and cognition (Vandelanotte, 2019). This analysis confirmed the hypothesis that the reportative conditional is, in fact, a grammatical mechanism of viewpoint construction, strategically employed by the speaker for semantic-pragmatic purposes, capable of triggering a shift in the cognitive perspective of the discourse.