Evidencialidade e conformidade no português brasileiro

Abstract

This article investigates the relation between conformity and evidentiality in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) through the lens of Usage-Based Construction Grammar (UBCG). Grounded in the conception of evidentiality as a category indicating the source of information, it is argued that conformative constructions are integral to the repertoire of evidential strategies available in BP. The study focuses on the following schemas: [According to X], [For X], [As X], [In accordance with X], and [Based on X], analyzed through synchronic data extracted from Superinteressante magazine (2020–2021), a corpus developed by Oliveira (2018). The analysis demonstrates that conformative constructions do not function uniformly: while some uses operate at the syntactic-semantic level, by introducing internal parameters to the event (circumstantial conformity), others act at the pragmatic-discursive level, establishing enunciative anchoring and specifying the source of the knowledge mobilized (evidential conformity). It is argued that such differences reflect the networked organization of the constructicon, involving inheritance relations between schemas, sub-schemas, and microconstructions, thereby contributing to the understanding of the lexico-grammatical continuum of evidentiality in BP.