A gramaticalização de a gente em Português Europeu: um estudo baseado em corpus

Abstract

This article intends to study the process of the grammaticalization of a gente which took place between the 13th and the 20th centuries (Lopes, 2004), comparing the different uses of the initial phase of grammaticalization, corresponding to the medieval period, and of the final phase (in the 19th and 20th centuries). To this end, a corpus was constituted composed of 156 excerpts extracted from the Computerized Corpus of Medieval Portuguese (CIPM) and the Corpus of Portuguese (CP) - subdivided into CP-Fiction and CP-News. In general, the results obtained corroborate conclusions already reached in other works on this evolutionary process (Nascimento, 1989; Menuzzi, 2000; Lopes, 2004; Costa & Pereira, 2013). However, we discovered some relevant aspects for this research: the use of a syntactic-semantic test to identify a gente with a semantic feature [φI], the impact of regency on verbal agreement and the relationship between the uses and functioning of a gente within the various discursive traditions in which it arises. CP-News data confirm the characteristic tension of journalistic discourse between objectivity and approach to the reader, as the frequencies of the interpretations under analysis are very close (43,6.0% vs. 56,4%) and we even found a verb form in the first-person plural which agrees with a gente.