Construções condicionais-concessivas insubordinadas com nem que no português brasileiro: uma análise cognitiva-construcional

Abstract

This study presents an analysis and description of insubordinate conditional-concessive constructions introduced by nem que in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In accordance with Evans’s (2007) proposal, constructions are considered insubordinate when they are conventionally used as main clauses, even if at first glance they appear to be formally subordinate. For this research, grounded in the assumptions of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995; 2006; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013), the general objective is to describe and analyze the formal and functional configurations of insubordinate conditional-concessive constructions in BP, with a focus on their degrees of independence and semantic specialization. As for the hypotheses, it is assumed that insubordinate constructions with nem que, within the domain of insubordinate conditional-concessive constructions, exhibit specific formal and functional patterns that distinguish them from spontaneous constructions and, despite vestiges of compositionality that set them apart from formulaic constructions, diverge from the prototypical semantic nuances of conditionality and concessiveness, acquiring more opaque textual-discursive meanings. To test these hypotheses, the corpus comprises instances of insubordinate conditional-concessive constructions drawn from the Corpus do Português/NOW (Davies and Ferreira, 2007). Methodologically, qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis are combined, with a particular focus on the qualitative treatment of the data for testing the hypotheses, with the aim of contrasting the findings with previous research, particularly on Spanish (Martínez Caro; Alba-Juez, 2021; Elvíra Garcia, 2016; Royo-Viñuales, Van Linden, 2022), French (Royo-Viñuales, Van Praet, Degand, 2022), and Portuguese (Hirata-Vale, 2015; Lira and Hirata-Vale, 2025). The results corroborate the hypotheses formulated and demonstrate that insubordinate constructions with nem que exclusively use inflected verb forms in the subjunctive mood, in the present, past, or future tenses, semantically associated with non-concrete, potential, or counterfactual situations and events that cognitively activate the broader conditional domain, despite the partial retention of the parameters of conditionality proposed by Dancygier (1998). Furthermore, a statistically significant association is observed among the pragmatic function, semantic frame, and verb tense of these constructions, which highlights their symbolic pairing in terms of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995). Finally, a syntactic-semantic-pragmatic continuum is proposed, based on the continuum of insubordination proposed by Hirata-Vale (2015), in which the three identified microconstructions function pragmatically as addenda, refutations, or replies and are distributed gradually, ranging from more compositional uses dependent on the immediate discursive context to highly conventionalized uses endowed with procedural values (Traugott and Dasher, 2002), such as “nem que a vaca tussa!”. Finally, it becomes evident that the (inter)subjective nature of these constructions is related to their scalar strength and to the expression of negative emotions, such as irony, which emerge gradually and in proportion to the degree of conventionalization of each microconstruction.