Construções com tanto que no português brasileiro segundo uma perspectiva funcionalista

Abstract

On this research, which is based on a perspective of Functional analysis, we study the use of "tanto que", according to a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic view collected from contemporary texts in Portuguese, formed on the theoretical assumptions of a functional language oriented approach, considering mainly the concepts of complex clauses and grammaticalization. In thegrammar compendius, this construction is showed as a correlative-consecutive conjunction, introducing consecutive adverbial clauses, which express, besides the consecutive idea, the cause-consequence relation. Although, based on our analysis, "tanto que" is usually used after the period and transgress the standard language, as it works as a transition mechanism between what was said and what will be said. In other words, it refers to the previous content anaphorically and, as a cataphora, introduces an argument to reinforce what was mentioned. "Tanto que" doesn't show the same structure use when in the middle of a clause, giving evidence of cause-consequence. Therefore, we analyse the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discoursive properties of these new constructions with "tanto que" in contemporary Portuguese, as well as relating them to the standard consecutive clauses which use this expression on their structure. Our corpus is composed by a wide range of "tanto que" occurences-and its variations selected from written textual genres. These occurences were analysed on a qualutative method to help us to understand their linguistic behavior. Based on this study, we could feature these "new" constructions as discourse connectors, which aim to introduce the prove about what was said and also shows an argumentative reinforcement.