ragmatic functions of double negative sentences in Porto Alegre in the end of the 20th century: a qualitative analysis of data found in sociolinguistic interviews

• Autor(a) principal: Petry, Paloma
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Goldnadel, Marcos, Lamberti, Luana
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1899
• topic: Dupla negação; Negação sentencial; Funções discursivas; Double negation; Sentential negation; Discursive functions

Brazilian Portuguese has semantically equivalent ways to perform sentential negation: pre-verbal negation, double negation and sentence-final negation. The variation, however, does not occur uniformly across different regions of Brazil. Data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century show that, while the Northeast region presented high rates of the three types of negation, other regions showed smaller amounts of the innovative forms: double negation and post-verbal, sentence-final negation. This paper analyzes 26 double negation utterances found in sociolinguistic interviews conducted between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s with twelve informants from the city of Porto Alegre. The objective was to verify if the face-saving tokens were used to express any of the pragmatic functions supposed in the specialized literature to be the motivation for the emergence of double negation utterances. The investigated corpus, due to the reduced number of occurrences of utterances with double negation and absence of utterances with sentence final negation, allows us to assume that Porto Alegre is part of a conservative region, therefore immune to the pragmatic bleaching that may have happened in the areas where innovative forms were largely spread. Among the twenty-six analyzed utterances, one could not be accommodated in the proposed functions and twenty-four perform discursive functions favored by association, recognized in much of the literature on utterances with re-inforced negation, between double negation utterances and activated discursive content: denial, return to quantitative topic and face preservation. Only one occurrence of double negation was identified instantiating a function not associated with activation: thematic pause. These results offer evidence in favor of the pragmatic hypotheses for the motivations for variation in sentential negation that shed light on the role of the association between language structure and conversational functions