TIPO, BRAZIL'S 'LIKE': SYNCHRONIC FUNCTIONAL AND PHONETIC ANALYSES OF NOMINAL, GRAMMATICAL, AND DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS
Date
2021-09-15
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-8845-1273
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
Previous research in Brazilian Portuguese has indicated that the noun tipo 'type,' 'kind' is undergoing grammaticalization (Bittencourt, 1999; Lima-Hernandes, 2005). Review of the literature, however, reveals a limited number of studies that provide an account of its current state in conversational speech. Moreover, research on the grammaticalization of tipo has been mostly limited to the examination of its multifunctionality (Bittencourt, 1999; Laurentino,2016; Lima-Hernandes, 2005), resulting in a gap as to how the processes of grammaticalization may be reflected on its use and production.
Using data from the Projeto Sociolingüístico Contemporâneo Brasileiro corpus (Thompson & Onosson, 2016), comprised of sociolinguistic interviews conducted with teenage public-school students in Rio de Janeiro, this dissertation presents the findings of a study that examined the current state of tipo in conversational discourse. An innovative multimethodological approach was employed aiming to address tipo's functional diversity. Distributional, functional, acoustic, and perceptual investigations were conducted with the goal to gain insight into some of the processes tipo is undergoing as it sheds its nominal properties and acquires new grammatical, discourse, and pragmatic functions.
Results reveal a functional expansion of tipo, which was found to be performing roles such as a preposition, a conjunction, and a discourse marker among others. More notably, results from a subsequent acoustic analysis reveal consistent differences in pronunciation between nominal and non-nominal forms, suggesting that as tipo expands to perform new functions, speakers are encoding such changes at the segment level. A discrimination task conducted with 98 teenage students also confirmed that speakers are able to discriminate nominal from non-nominal forms, suggesting that other processes beyond durational differences may be playing a role in the grammaticalization of that noun.
Description
Keywords
Sociolinguistics, Language variation and change, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics, Teenagers, Brazilian Portuguese
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
Linguistics
Program
Linguistics