A construção quer dizer nas variedades do português brasileiro, moçambicano e angolano: estágios e trajetórias de gramaticalização

Abstract

This research investigates the construction quer dizer in varieties of Brazilian, Mozambican, and Angolan Portuguese, from the perspective of grammaticalization. The aim is to analyze the uses of quer dizer, considering different stages of the grammaticalization process and its role in the discursive-pragmatic domain. Specifically, it seeks to identify and describe the uses of quer dizer in the three varieties analyzed, establish criteria for distinguishing between less and more grammaticalized uses, to propose a systematization of the construction’s grammaticalization stages, to examine the influence of morphosyntactic context on the emergence and functioning of grammaticalized uses, and to compare the varieties in focus in order to identify convergences and divergences in the construction's functional trajectory. The theoretical foundations of this research are anchored in North American-oriented linguistic Functionalism, more precisely in the grammaticalization approach as conceived by Hopper and Traugott (2003 [1993]), Martelotta, Votre and Cezario (1996), Gonçalves et al. (2007), among others. It also draws on works regarding the grammaticalization of quer dizer, namely: Dal Mago (2001), Carneiro (2006), Gonçalves et al. (2007), Carvalho and Silva (2018), Almeida (2022), Almeida and Carvalho (2025), among others. In this sense, a gradual change process is advocated, sensitive to usage and conditioned by discursive-pragmatic factors. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative-quantitative approach is adopted (Lacerda, 2016). In this case, the qualitative bias allows for the functional description of the uses of the construction quer dizer, while the quantitative bias measures the distribution and recurrence in the analyzed varieties, which lends greater rigor to the comparative analysis of the data. For the description of the phenomenon, this research uses as its corpus a set of texts extracted from the Corpus of Portuguese (Davies; Ferreira, 2006), which includes data from the Brazilian, Mozambican, and Angolan varieties. 300 occurrences of quer dizer were collected and analyzed in each variety of Portuguese examined, allowing for the comparison of uses and the different stages of grammaticalization identified. The analysis highlighted the multifunctionality of quer dizer, identifying different uses, and also considered morphosyntactic and discursive factors relevant to identifying the stages of grammaticalization of this construction. By adopting a comparative approach, the study aims to contribute to the understanding of grammaticalization processes in pluricentric Portuguese, since the Portuguese language has more than one center of reference, evidencing non-homogeneous trajectories in the constitution of discursive constructions of the varieties examined here. The results indicate that the most grammaticalized uses of the construction quer dizer tend to occur in contexts without a subject, without the presence of the conjunction que, and in argumentative sequences. It is observed that, although the three varieties present similar trajectories of grammaticalization, this process is slightly more advanced in the African varieties compared to the Brazilian variety.