Semantic changes of the construction Vção in Portuguese

Abstract

Since around the past fifteen years, contemporary studies in the field of functional linguistics have been more thoroughly turning to assumptions and frameworks built up by cognitive linguistics. Taking into consideration such an interface, the present work aims to assess processes of constructionalization ‒ more precisely, processes of semantic change ‒ relative to the semantic dimension of a specific micro-construction, that is, the Portuguese noun “situação”, a nominalization with the suffix -ção, taking conceptual metaphor as an analytical basis. This analysis explore an online corpus of posts on Twitter (Twitter Inc.), made by regular users of the social network. A relevant result implies that the meanings conveyed by contemporary uses of both “situação”, as well as its plural form “situações”, mostly relinquish the both basic (or literal) and metaphorical meanings of the verb “situar”, from which those micro-constructions stem.
KEYWORDS: Constructionalization; Semantic change; Conceptual metaphor.