Motivações competidoras entre a construção relativa passiva e a construção de adjetivo deverbal de particípio passado

Abstract

A recurrent phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese language – and practically uninvestigated – is a supposed variation between the relative construction in the passive voice, as in “[d]a menina que foi queimada pelos sequestradores”, and the past participle adjective construction, as in “um congresso de jovens organizado pela diretoria da jubaleste”, both as a noun modifier. Even though such constructions are viewed as interchangeable, we find that they have distinct formal properties and perform different semantic-cognitive and discursive-pragmatic functions. Therefore, the central focus of this work is the relative construction in the passive voice (CRVP) and the past participle adjective construction (CAPP). Our objective is to identify motivations to the uses of these constructions, considering factors that favor or restrict the use of one and the other. To base our analysis, we use the theoretical and methodological support of the Usage-Based Functional Linguistic (LFCU), integrating contributions from Construction Grammar, based on researchers such as Croft (2001), Goldberg (1995, 2003, 2006), Bybee ([2010] 2016), Traugott e Trousdale (2013), among others. Methodologically, the research is characterized as qualitative with quantitative support. The analysis material comes from the Corpus Discurso & Gramática – Seção Natal, made up of spoken and written texts of informants with distinct educational levels.