Pragmatic epistemic markers based on entender in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this article, we aim to identify, describe, and conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of epistemic pragmatic markers (EPM), as defined by Traugott (2021, 2022), conventionalized as a grammatical construction derived from the verbal base entender ‘to understand’. The study is based on 427 data points collected from three corpora of contemporary Brazilian Portuguese - NURC, D&G and the social network X—and is grounded in the assumptions of Usage-Based Linguistics, as presented in Brazil by Rosário (2022), Rosário and Oliveira (2016), Furtado da Cunha, Bispo, and Silva (2013). The results indicate that the EPM investigated across the three corpora: (a) have [(en)tendeu(?)] as the most productive type; (b) tend to occur predominantly in clause-final position, following the statement over which they take scope; and (c) are more productive in the instantiation of argumentative typological sequences, a trend consistent with the epistemic pragmatic function they assume.