NOW: THE OPERATION OF A LANGUAGE ITEM

Abstract

ABSTRACT
The present work aims at analyzing, under the functionalist theory, the process of Grammaticalization of the item agora which, according to the grammatical tradition, is commonly classified as an adverb of present time and, under a synchronic approach, however, one may observe that this element may represent a greater abstraction among the speakers. Considering the last perspective, patterns of agora found in the Corpus de Português Popular de Vitória da Conquista – BA, from Grupo de Pesquisa em Linguística Histórica and of Grupo de Pesquisa em Sociofuncionalismo – CNPq, were selected and cathegorized. In this work, initially, we give a brief treatment about functionalism which main purpose is to observe language according to its usage. We are going to describe the process of grammaticalization, According to the postulates of Hopper (1991) apud Neves (2001) and Gonçalves (2007) that demonstrate how one item which occupies one class of adverbs can migrate to a connection function. We demonstrate that this process is happening to the linguistic unit agora, presenting the history of this item and the way it is exposed in grammatical compendiums and in etymological dictionaries of Portuguese. Next, we observe how this linguistic element is dealt in recent works especially in Rodrigues (2009), Duque (2009) and Philippsen (2011). Finally, the occurrences of the unit, in the corpus mentioned above, were selected, analyzed and categorized, demonstrating that the item agora moves through classes beyond adverbs. Considering the works of Neves (2001), one may verify that this linguistic item goes from a more concrete sense – adverb of time - to be found, functioning as a conjunction and speech introducer, after having suffered the Grammaticalization process, referring to the linear arrangement SPACE > TIME > TEXT. Moreover, it has its temporal spectrum amplified, occupying a higher level of abstraction.