Transparência e opacidade na marcação de plural do SN na lusofonia sob a perspectiva da GDF

Abstract

This study analyzes, from the perspective of the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), of Hengeveld e Mackenzie (2008), the plural marking in the noun phrase in spoken Portuguese in Portuguese-speaking countries that have Portuguese as their official language, namely: (i) Brazil; (ii) Portugal; (iii) Angola; (iv) Cape Verde; (v) Guinea-Bissau; (vi) Mozambique; (vii) São Tomé and Príncipe; and (viii) East Timor, using speech samples from the oral corpus organized by the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon. Corroborating the hypothesis that the Brazilian variety is the most transparent one, considering studies that prove less expressive use of the plural copy in all elements of the noun phrase (NP) in Brazilian Portuguese (LIPSKI, 2008), the general objective of the study is to investigate violations of transparency in the plural marking in Portuguese varieties, by observing the definite (“five horses”) and indefinite (“The horses”) quantification, by means of the theoretical contribution of Leufkens (2015) and Câmara et al. (2017). Knowing that linguistic transparency occurs, basically, in the one-to-one relationships between meaning and form, we seek to verify the occurrence of multiple forms of plural marking in the context of noun phrases (NPs) in each of the varieties, with the specific objectives of investigating: (i) the presence of explicit variants and variants (0); (ii) the plural marking inside or outside the nucleus of the NP; (iii) composition of SN; and (iv) the position of internal constituents of the NP. The study assumes the perspective that there is opacity when there are repetitions of plural marking in both quantifications (definite and indefinite) and that there is transparency when the plural is marked only once, a perspective assumed by Leufkens (2015). For the verification of how the plural marking occurs in the agreement and number agreement within the scope of the selected corpus, through the investigation of relations of transparency and opacity between the representational and morphosyntactic levels, a qualitative-quantitative methodology was adopted, with the support of the Goldvarb software. The results prove the initial hypothesis, as the data reveal a more expressive use of the plural only in one of the constituents of the NP in the Brazilian Portuguese; the Timorese variety, on the other hand, is the opaquest variety, since the plural marking occurs in all the constituents of the analyzed NPs. It is important to reiterate that the results of the analysis are restricted to the universe of the corpus analyzed, with no intention of offering a comparative analysis that generalizes the behavior of the varieties. What is observed here are usage trends, which may be proven in the future with a more expressive data sampling.