THE "CORTEI O CABELO" CONSTRUCTION IN PORTUGUESE

Abstract

The 'cortei o cabelo' (I cut my hair) construction has a very specific meaning: that the participant in the subject position had his or her hair cut. This article investigates how language users use the construction and why this meaning is used. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach (Goldberg, 1995, 2006, 2019; Barlow, Kemmer, 2000; Bybee, 2010; Langacker, 2013; Tomasello, 1998; 2003, 2008; Evans, Green, 2006; Croft, Cruise, 2004) and a methodology that combines corpus analysis and survey data, we argue that the construction 'cortei o cabelo' (I cut my hair) emerges as an extension of the transitive construction because it presents high coverage (cf. Goldberg, 2019) — a domain-general cognitive factor that encompasses all aspects that contribute to high accessibility (Suttle and Goldberg, 2011). We also argue that the use of the 'cortei o cabelo' (I cut my hair) construction is motivated by its function: to communicate that a service was obtained while also concisely implying that one was responsible for its performance. Once this function is recognized, all the observed properties of the construction unfold naturally (cf. Herbst and Goldberg, 2021), such as: its form, its specific meaning, its centered on a conventionalized scenario of service provision meaning, the lack of reconciliation with the passive construction, and the openness to new, extended meanings.