Amália Mendes+, Eugênia Duarte*, Luciana Ávila*

+Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal / *Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Epistemic modality in varieties of Portuguese: variation and codification

Keywords: Portuguese varieties; Modality; Spoken and Written registers; Norm codification

Modality is a complex phenomenon that may be expressed by mood and tense, by lexical items such as verbs and adjectives and also by syntactic constructions such as conditionals. Our goal is to study the variation in the expression of epistemic modality in both spoken and written corpora of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP), focusing on auxiliary verbs and predicative elements (verbs and adjectives).
Our objective is two-fold: to analyse how written and spoken data converge or diverge in the codification of epistemic values, and their relation with the grammatical norm; and to cross our findings with the evolution path of each of the two Portuguese varieties under consideration. The preference in BP for the projection of a subject over impersonal constructions has been related to modality in Duarte (2012).
Spoken data of BP confirm that epistemic and deontic values favour the projection of a subject and that adjectival modal markers with predicative verbs (é possível que ‘it is possible that’) are less frequent in spoken data of BP.
The work in Mello et al. (2013) singles out the diversity of expressions of epistemic values in the CORAL-BRASIL spoken corpus. Our analysis will take into consideration, for BP, a subset of the NURC-RJ spoken corpus, a subset of the CORAL-BRASIL (Ávila, 2014) and a set of written texts, and, for EP, a subset of the C-ORAL-ROM spoken corpus (Bacelar do Nascimento et al, 2008) and a written corpus annotated with modality (Hendrickx et al, 2012).
It is especially important to account for spoken data since this is the area where language change is most immediately visible and possible patterns of divergence between varieties may be uncovered. Our contrastive study of epistemicity in BP and EP will provide input to test the hypothesis of syntactic and discourse diverging patterns between these two equally dominant varieties of Portuguese.

References

Ávila, Luciana (2014) Modalidade em perspectiva: estudo baseado em corpus oral do português brasileiro. Thesis (PhD – Linguistics). Belo Horizonte, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Bacelar do Nascimento, Maria Fernanda, Bettencourt Gonçalves, José, Veloso, Rita, Antunes, Sandra, Barreto, Florbela, Amaro,Raquel (2005) “The Portuguese Corpus”, in: Emanuela Cresti, Massimo Moneglia (eds.), C-ORAL-ROM: Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 163-207.
Duarte, Maria Eugénia (2012) “A expressão da modalidade deôntica e epistêmica na fala e na escrita e o padrão SV”, .
Hendrickx, Iris, Mendes, Amália, Mencarelli, Silvia (2012) “Modality in Text: a proposal for corpus annotation”, in: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 2012, Istanbul, 21-27 de Maio de 2012, 1805-1812.
Mello, H. R., Paixão, C. A., Coelho, F. C., Souza, R. R. (2013) “Distribution of modality markers in Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech”, in: Quantitave Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics 5, 2013, Leuven. Proceedings QITL 5. Leuven: KU Leuven, 2013. p. 64-67.