Relativa livre introduzida por quem: uma interpretação funcionalista

Abstract

In this work, I investigate the free relative clause introduced by “who(m)” (e.g. “eu conheço quem comprou os ingressos”) in written Brazilian Portuguese (PB). The aim is to examine it in order to detect formal and functional aspects involved in its constitution and use. In addition, I propose to verify how this sentence pattern can be located categorically, based on its formal and functional properties. The database for this research is composed of texts extracted from the set of corpora of the Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB) project, particularly newspaper advertisements and private letters that have circulated in Brazil during the nineteenth century. The theoretical support is the Usage-Based Functional Linguistics, as characterized in Furtado da Cunha, Bispo and Silva (2013). In methodological terms, this research is of eminently qualitative character grounded in quantitative support and it has descriptiveexplanatory objectives. The results show that, from the formal point of view, this clause works both in the scope of the verbal phrase and in the nominal one. Moreover, in this kind of relative clause, the quem loses one of the properties of relative pronouns, that of returning to a preceding term. In relation to functional properties, the "who(m)" (plus other elements of this clause) form a unit of nominal character, whose features are [+ ANIMATE], [+ HUMAN] and [+-DEFINID/GENERIC] and some sociointerational issues underlie the use of this structure. Lastly, data analysis indicates that, categorically, this structure may be situated on a continuum between complement clauses and restrictive relative clauses with antecedent.