Banca de DEFESA: LUÊNISSON LUÍS MESQUITA DE OLIVEIRA

From grammar to speech: analysis of the 'take-te' construction spoken in the city of Santarém-PA

Item tomar. Functionalism. Construction Grammar. Construction toma-te.

In this work, we seek to investigate the function that the construction “toma-te/lhe” plays in the Santareno speech. This research fits into the functionalist theory, for “Language is determined by the real communication situations in which real speakers interact, and therefore, its study cannot be limited to the analysis of its form” (FURTADO DA CUNHA; TAVARES, 2007, p. 14). Furthermore, this work is based on the theory of Construction Grammar, which defends the postulate that language, from a synchronic perspective, is provided by form-meaning pairings, the so-called constructions, organized in a network (GOLDBERG, 2006; LANGACKER, 2008). For this work we used the following methodological procedures: a) a collection of data, which were recorded informally by the Linguistic Studies Group of Western Pará – GELOPA, in the period from 2020 to 2021. 51 (fifty-one) occurrences of uses of tomar in the context of Santareno speech, 42 (forty-two) with the expression “toma-te” and 9 (nine) with the variation “toma-lhe”; b) semantic-pragmatic analysis of occurrences, in an attempt to understand what these forms express, what the speaker's communicative intention is when using such a construction at the time of interaction, this we will call function; and c) perception test, which served to corroborate the hypotheses we raised about the meanings of the construction under study. We reproduced real situations in which the use appeared denoting the three most important possibilities that we consider the constructions to mean, namely: contentment with the other's pain, astonishment/fright and happiness. The results indicated that the construction “toma-te/lhe” plays an important role in the interaction of Santarém speakers.