Banca de DEFESA: ANA FLÁVIA MATOS FREIRE

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : ANA FLÁVIA MATOS FREIRE
DATE: 06/06/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Plataforma Google Meet
TITLE:

Functional-constructionist approach to shoulda, coulda and woulda: TAM in present-day American English

KEY WORDS:

Auxiliariness; TAM construction; shoulda, coulda and woulda; Usage-Based Functional Linguistics; present-day American English.

PAGES: 228
BIG AREA: Lingüística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Lingüística
SUBÁREA: Teoria e Análise Lingüística
SUMMARY:

In this dissertation, we focus on the TAM construction with shoulda, coulda, and woulda, forms derived from should have, could have, and would have, in present-day American English. Our objective is to analyze the functional and formal properties of this construction and to characterize it in terms of productivity, schematicity, compositionality, and its hierarchical organization as a network. Our theoretical and methodological framework is based on Usage-Based Functional Linguistics. Usage-Based Functional Linguistics (LFCU), based on Furtado da Cunha, Bispo, and Silva (2013), and Furtado da Cunha and Bispo (2013, 2023), among others. We adopt a usage-based grammar perspective (Bybee, 2010) and draw from Construction Grammar as developed by Goldberg (1995), Croft (2001), and Traugott and Trousdale (2013). For auxiliariness, we mainly rely on Heine (1993), Bybee (1995, 2010), and Brinton and Brinton (2010); for the category of aspect, we turn to Croft (2012); and for modality, we base our analysis on Lyons (1977). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) serves as the research database, and WordSmith Tools 7.0 is the software used for corpus processing, identification of occurrences, measurement of token and type frequencies, and analysis of the construction’s usage contexts. From a functional perspective, we identified a motivated relationship between form and function, considering the subprinciples of quantity and integration. Regarding prototypicality and categorization, we observed that the properties identified in the uses of shoulda, coulda, and woulda align with characteristics exhibited by full auxiliaries. These forms express the categories of tense and aspect (present perfect), and modality (deontic, epistemic and volitional). We also found that due to metaphorical and metonymic projections, as well as mechanisms of analogy and reanalysis, we have new uses and new configurations (expansion of forms for filling the VP slot) for the establishment of new links with other auxiliaries more representative of the category. Furthermore, we observed that informal spoken contexts, marked by intersubjectivity and the presence of a first-person subject, favor the use of the construction analyzed here. From a formal standpoint, we found that this construction essentially consists of two subparts: an auxiliary (V_AUX) and a main verb (VP), represented as [V_AUX VP]_TAM. Morphophonologically, the first subpart is filled by one of the three forms resulting from the fusion between should, could, and would with have;the second subpart, in turn, can be filled by a verbal element lexically explicit or not. We also found that the construction may appear with an explicit or elided subject and that an adverb may occur between the auxiliary and the VP. The [V_AUX VP]_TAM construction is schematic and exhibits different degrees of semantic compositionality and loss of morphophonological and syntactic compositionality. This schematic pattern licenses three subschemas, [shoulda VP]_TAM, [coulda VP]_TAM, and [woulda VP]_TAM, which capture functional particularities in TAM marking and sanction nine intermediate-level patterns based on the VP’s morphology (past participle, past, infinitive). Each of these nine subschemas licenses micro-constructional types based on the semantic category of the VP, totaling 109 types, which, in turn, sanction, at a non-schematic level, further types in which specific verb lexemes fill the VP slot. This construction has horizontal relationships with the TAM construction of its predecessor forms, and is thus considered an allostruction, which relate taxonomically to an auxiliary construction at a higher level of abstraction. Our findings, therefore, indicate that shoulda, coulda, and woulda function as emerging TAM auxiliaries in English to express hypothetical situations in the past.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Interno - 1551756 - EDVALDO BALDUINO BISPO
Externa à Instituição - ROSA VALLEJOS YOPÁN
Externa à Instituição - MARIA MAURA DA CONCEIÇÃO CEZARIO - UFRJ
Externo à Instituição - MONCLAR GUIMARÃES LOPES - UFF
Externo à Instituição - PATRÍCIA FABIANE AMARAL DA CUNHA LACERDA - UFJF