The semantic organization of grammatical categories: a constructional analysis of concessive adverbial subordinators

Abstract

Within the universe of the category of concessive adverbial complex subordinators, this study aims at explicating the compositional patterns of these adverbial subordinators, in such a way to propose how they are organized within a semantic space of concessivity. In this sense, two hypotheses are developed here: (i) it is argued that the way in which morphosyntactic properties map onto semantic properties in the establishment of complex grammatical categories is the result of compositional operations implicated in the established of the constructional meaning of linguistic tokens; (ii) it is considered, then, that the organization of concessive adverbial subordinators is based on their constructional compositional properties. The study shows that concessive adverbial subordinators are organized around a prototypical center formed of the conjunctions embora, ainda que and conquanto, which are semantically less specified.