Constructional variation, change and stabilization in [sei] and [aham sei] as disbelief answers in Brazilian Portuguese

Resumo

This paper aims to analyze how constructional variation, change and constructional stabilization occur with [sei] and [aham sei] as disbelief answers in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) instead of their common use linked to cognitive sense (the act of knowing something/knowing about something or knowing how to do something), perceived primarily by differences in intonation and conversational context. For this, we’ll see the results found by Souza (2024) who, based on corpora data and tests made with native speakers, seek to understand a little further how constructional variation happens in this case and what are the preponderant factors for these speakers to choose those constructions instead of others or vice-versa in some specific dialogical scenarios. His work, elaborated under a socioconstructionist profile studied how Construction Grammar and Variationist Sociolinguistic can contribute to explain empirically the results found, which led us to follow the same theoretical path in order to expand the examples and expose interesting data shown at his work, specially how schematicity and productivity happen within these constructions. In sum, we present the most prominent results of a work that studies how prosodic features interfere in the form-meaning paring in the analyzed data, an interface still underexplored at the constructional studies field.