Paralelismo lingüístico

Abstract

Linguistic parallelism has been widely discussed in variationistliterature as an independent variable, often in the form of repetitionof the same variant of the dependent variable, in many linguisticphenomena and in a vast number of languages. In this paper, Idiscuss three main aspects of parallelism: (i) whether it can beinterpreted within the functional theoretical framework; (ii) theexistence of underlying functional principles; and (iii) whether itcan be accounted for by a single principle. In my discussion, I willpresent results for three linguistic phenomena that are affected bylinguistic parallelism on the discourse, clausal, syntagmatic, andword levels in Brazilian Portuguese. I will then discuss a largebody of research in which this constraint has been analyzed. Iconclude that the study of linguistic parallelism shows that thestudy of language use and structure can be better accounted forthrough variationist theory, functionalism, and discourse analysisworking together.