Temporal hypotactic intercalation between subject and verb in portuguese language and the referential (re)construction

Abstract

The temporal clauses that are interspersed between subject and verb have a referential orientation function, according to Autor (ano), although the author has not specified it in detail. In this sense, from a dialogue between Functionalism in linguistics and Textual Linguistics (NEVES, 2004; BRAGA; PAIVA, 2017), we aim to verify how the temporals interspersed between subject and verb serve the referenciation (MONDADA; DUBOIS, 2019[1995]). The corpus of this investigation is composed of formal texts compiled by the NUPACT-UFJF research group. After collecting prototypical temporal clauses, introduced by the connector when, we located 439 data from these clauses in different positions, among which 75 were intercalated. Among the interspersed, only 9 tokens represent the subject-temporal clause-verb type, whose referent subject is analyzed from the perspective of referential processes (CAVALCANTE; MARTINS, 2020) and by the parameters of definiteness (NEVES, 2013), informational status (PRINCE, 1992), anaphoric accessibility and cataphoric persistence (GIVÓN, 1995). The results show that the interspersed temporals can serve several functions in the referential process: (i) focus a certain cut in the temporal evolutionary line of the existence of a referent; (ii) restrict a referent; (iii) recategorize a referent; (iv) specify a referent; (v) build an evaluation of a referent; (vi) anaphorically resuming a referent; (vii) promote the topicalization of a referent; (viii) facilitate topical referenciation; and (ix) explaining a change in topical perspective. Therefore, the assumption that the interspersed uses serve the referential construction in the texts and can also contribute to the topical dynamism of the utterances is confirmed.