Comparison beyond the clause: use of imperative propositional attitude constructions

Abstract

During the last decade, some works have discussed the possible linguistic manifestations of comparison in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), proposing new ways of categorization (Tota, 2013; Thompson, 2019; Rodrigues and Thompson, 2020; Siqueira and Tota, 2022). In general, this indicates how normative grammar and other types of description do not sufficiently list all linguistic manifestations of comparison, below and beyond the clausal level. Given this, we have investigated syntactic, semantic, and discursive behavior of what we call “imperative constructions of propositional attitude”. We start here with two hypotheses: 1) comparison is not a mere semantic category, but comes from a broader cognitive scheme; 2) statements introduced by some epistemic verbs – pensar (think), imaginar (imagine), supor (suppose) –  can function, if integrated with the conjunction que (that), as discourse markers and mediate circumstantial relations of comparison. So, saying “Você precisa ter mais confiança quando joga bola, como se fosse o Rei do Futebol, o Pelé (You need to have more confidence when you play ball, as if you were the King of Football, Pelé)” or “Você precisa ter mais confiança quando joga bola. Imagine que você é o Rei do Futebol, o Pelé. (You need to have more confidence when you play ball. Imagine that you are the King of Football, Pelé.)” there would be two possibilities to express comparison. In the first case, there is a canonical connector, “as if”, which makes evident the semantic. Second, the relationship between clauses does not select a comparative connector but presents a construction of the type [V epis que]: it builds a hypothesis space, which is compared to the element mentioned previously in the same statement. The foundations of this study rely on Cognitive Linguistics and Usage-Based Construction Grammar (GCBU). More specifically, the contributions of Langacker (1987, 2008), Johnson (1987) and Hilpert (2014) are considered here, in order to outline the structural, discursive and cognitive dimensions of the aforementioned construction. Such theoretical perspectives supported our methodological choices, especially with regard to the conventionality and frequency of linguistic uses. Initially, we applied strategies common to Corpus Linguistics, in order to obtain real and sufficiently representative data. They were extracted by the platform Corpus do Português, 9679 occurrences, among which 1000 samples were selected for analysis. In the second stage, we developed a psycholinguistic comprehension task, whose experimental items were created based on the results of the corpus analysis. The aim was to statistically measure how much the comparison can be perceived when there is this type of imperative construction, in a sample of speakers. Therefore, they were also able to indicate whether they considered these structures necessary (or not) to identify comparability in the relationship between clauses and phrases. When analyzing the results of the analyses, attention was drawn to almost all constructions in exemplification contexts (frames of example), also common to canonical comparative constructions. These were also the items that showed higher levels of comparability in the comprehension task, if correlated with other achievements of the same construction. The analyzes also indicated a predilection between the use of verbs. The result is that “imagine” and “suppose” are preferred when establishing hypothetical comparisons.