The Brazilian Portuguese constructions [que x o que] / [que x que nada]

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the use and emergence of the constructions [que x o que] (what x the what) and [que x que nada] (what x that nothing) in Brazilian Portuguese, using the theoretical framework of the constructionist approach (Goldberg, 1995; Croft & Cruise, 2004; Traugott & Trousdale, 2013). Such constructions, recurrent in the oral modality of the language in situations of dialogue, function as a mechanism of discordance, as they incorporate the linguistic information to be refuted (explicit or not in the communicative event) and operate at the same level of crystallized expressions, e.g., the idiomatic ones. The analyzed data were extracted from the corpora C-oral Brasil and Corpus do Português as well as from Google. In this study, the focus is to understand the formal and functional motivations of the use of these constructions in real situations of language use. The results show complexity in the interpretation of these expressions regarding the form-function pairing, given that the gradient of this pairing is relatively opaque and results from metonymic processes.