The development of the connector “na hora que” in Portuguese: a qualitative analysis within a constructional perspective

Abstract

The study of language change from a constructionist framework has been developed at least since a decade ago (Diewald 2006, Bergs and Diewald 2008, Traugott 2008, among others). In this paper, we have chosen a constructionalization perspective (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) for a diachronic analysis of the development of the temporal connector na hora que in the Portuguese Language (PL) (Longhin-Thomazi 2011). As a hypothesis, we propose that this connector has originated from an expression that indicated the meaning of momento. Over time, the expression has undergone gradual constructional changes until it was constructionalized under the sense of the conjunction quando. In order to test this hypothesis, we selected two corpora and two databases: Colonia: Corpus of Historical Portuguese (Zampieri and Becker 2013) and C-ORAL-BRASIL (Raso and Mello 2012); Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval (Xavier and Crispim 2002) and Corpus do Português (Davies and Ferreira 2006), which allowed access to a set of approximately 52.3 million words from the PL, covering the period from the 12th to the 21st centuries. The results showed that the cline of the constructionalization of this connector would be represented as: em hora que (no momento que) > na hora que (no momento que) > na hora que (quando). Admitting post-constructional changes, two forms would be added a hora que > hora que.

Keywords

• diacronía
• construcionalización
• lengua portuguesa
• conector temporal