Diachronic trajectory of the connector com isso in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the diachronic trajectory of the complex connector com isso, sometimes used as a sequencer, sometimes as a logical-semantic or discursive-argumentative connector in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (LOPES; SILVA, 2022). To achieve this goal, we resort to the theoretical assumptions of Cognitive-Functional Linguistics (CUNHA et al., 2013; OLIVEIRA; ROSÁRIO, 2016), especially to the model of constructionalization and constructional changes (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013), whose main purpose is the historical description of language under constructionist bias. Our initial hypothesis was that the adverbial adjunct com isso went through constructional changes over the centuries, what favored its later constructionalization as a (extra)clause connector. This hypothesis was tested through a quali-quantitative analysis (LACERDA, 2016; LOPES, 2022) of 442 tokens, from the 15th to the 21st century, extracted from the following corpora: Vercial, Tycho Brahe and Now. The results of this research reveal the following trajectory of com isso: 1) The adverbial adjunct began to be placed before its subordinator, but still quite linked to it syntactically and semantically; 2) the preceding adverbial adjunct began to be juxtaposed with a canonical connector, especially “e” (and) – “e com isso” –, which was a favorable context for it to progressively inherit properties of connection; 3) com isso became an autonomous connector, insofar as it started to act in the left margin of the clause, the sentence of the paragraph, without the need for juxtaposition to another connector.