Abstract
ABSTRACTPrevious studies on the diachrony of wh-interrogation in Brazilian Portuguese have observed a replacement process of ex-situ-wh interrogatives by cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives in the twentieth century. The present study analyzes almost 19,000 wh-interrogatives from a corpus of theater plays dated between 1800 and 2016, demonstrating that not all of these frequency changes constitute actual change. The increase in the usage frequency of several types of wh-interrogatives is partially or entirely due to changes in the degree of orality of theater plays, or changes in word order. Moreover, only some of these changes can be characterized as changes from below, that is, changes in which high-orality texts are affected by the frequency increase first. This notion is also relevant for functional change in wh-interrogatives. Over time, the use of cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives spread from contexts in which the proposition is highly accessible to low-accessibility contexts. For cleft-wh, this change is moderated by orality, again indicating change from below.
Highlights
Present-day Brazilian Portuguese (BP) possesses several wh-interrogative constructions
Almost all of the previous studies on changes in Portuguese wh-interrogatives analyze theater texts, a genre that might represent spoken language more accurately than, for example, prose, a priori we cannot exclude the possibility that the increase in the usage frequencies of CLEFTWH, INSITUWH, and REDUCEDCLEFTWH is due to genre change in these theater texts
By controlling for the degree of orality of the texts, three types of change are identified: (i) apparent change, that is, change that is due to the rising degree of orality in BP theater plays; (ii) actual change “from below”, i.e., reflecting social conventionalization processes in the speaker community; and (iii) genre change that is independent from orality
Summary
Previous studies have demonstrated that the usage frequency of CLEFTWH (1b) and INSITUWH (1d) has increased over time in BP, to the detriment of EXSITUWH (1a). Changes in text frequencies can be due to apparent change reflecting environmental changes in the text genre (cf., for example, Szmrecsanyi [2016]) These considerations are nontrivial to the study of the changes in the Portuguese system of wh-interrogatives, because the spoken-written dimension plays a crucial role for the variation in the use of wh-interrogatives. Almost all of the previous studies on changes in Portuguese wh-interrogatives analyze theater texts, a genre that might represent spoken language more accurately than, for example, prose, a priori we cannot exclude the possibility that the increase in the usage frequencies of CLEFTWH, INSITUWH, and REDUCEDCLEFTWH is due to genre change in these theater texts. The changes in the usage contexts of CLEFTWH and INSITUWH interrogatives are analyzed, demonstrating that (a) there is an increase in the probability of CLEFTWH and INSITUWH to be used in contexts in which the proposition has a low degree of accessibility, and (b) for CLEFTWH, this increase is moderated by orality
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