Form and function in the FOCO SER construction in Portuguese: a usage-based constructionist approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2025.85518Keywords:
Usage-based construction grammar, Information structure, Foco serAbstract
This work studies Foco Ser construction as a pairing of form and function in Portuguese schematized as [PRED SER FOC]. Thus, it employs the contributions of Usage-Based Construction Grammar, mainly regarding sentence informational structure. The research uses qualitative analysis of data collected from the Corpus do Português website and shows that, from a formal point of view, the Foco Ser construction can be combined with a varied set of Portuguese constructions and, therefore, focus on a broad set of elements. Furthermore, the construction can either exhibit a mood-tense correlation between the predicator of the sentence and the copula or lack such correlation, in which case the copula always occurs in the present tense of the indicative mood. From the point of view of function, the construction marks contrast and emphasis, and can recurrently focus on inferable or inactive elements in the discourse.
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