Free relative introduced by WHO: a functionalist approach
Free relative. Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso. Formal and functional aspects.
In this work, I investigate the free relative clause introduced by “who(m)” in written Brazilian Portuguese (PB), identifying its morpho syntactic characteristics and semantic, cognitive, and discursive-pragmatic aspects implied in its constitution and in the recurrence of its data in real situations of interaction. The database for this research are composed of texts extracted from the set of corpora of the Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB) project. Particularly newspaper advertisements and private letters that have circulated in Brazil during the nineteenth century. The theoretical support is the Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso (LFCU), as characterized in Furtado da Cunha, Bispo and Silva (2013). In methodological terms, this research is of eminently qualitative character grounded in quantitative support and it has descriptive-explanatory objectives. Preliminary results indicate that, in the formal point of view, this clause works both in the scope of the verbal phrase and the nominal one, assuming grammatical relations of argument, complement and adjunct. In addition to this, in this structure, the "who(m)" loses some properties of relative pronoun. In relation to semantic aspects, the component elements of this structure form a unit of nominal character, whose features are [+ ANIMATE], [+ HUMAN], [+ -DEFINITE] and [+ -GENERIC]. In a discursive-pragmatic view, the principle of iconicity and some sociointerational issues underlie to the use of this structure.