Marcadores pragmáticos no Funcionalismo: da abordagem clássica à construcional

Abstract

Our objective in this article is to demonstrate how the class of pragmatic markers (PM), according to Traugott (2021, 2022a, 2022b), has been described and analyzed in relatively distinct ways within North American strands of functionalist studies. We assume that the variation in the treatment of PM throughout the history of functionalist research reflects an internal development within this framework, as argued by Rosário and Oliveira (2016). According to these authors, the starting point is the so-called “classical functionalism,” referring to the seminal theoretical postulates established in the 1970s, which have since been revised and refined up to the present day, particularly through the incorporation of the constructional approach, as proposed by Traugott and Trousdale (2013), and which is referred to as Usage-Based Linguistics. We argue that this theoretical trajectory or reorientation is clearly reflected in the research on PM, especially in the way the frameworks of grammaticalization, de(s)grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and constructionalization are adopted to account for this category. We contend that the functionalist-constructionist treatment of PM, more recently incorporated into their study, can contribute to a deeper understanding of these elements, both in terms of their pragmatic-discursive function and in terms of their more complex structural behavior, particularly regarding the contextual environments in which they occur.