ONGOING GRAMMATICALIZATION PROCESS OF THE LEXEME "TIPO": A STUDY BASED ON A SPONTANEOUS SPEECH CORPUS OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Résumé

The lexeme "tipo" (type) has been described in literature as discourse marker (BITTENCOURT, 1999; DAMASIO-LOPES, 2008; CASTELANO; LADEIRA, 2010). However, not all tokens found in a corpus either operates as a discursive marker or as a full lexical item. Some occurrences seem rather to have a grammatical meaning. This paper aims thus at presenting evidence that the lexeme has been undergoing not only a discursivization but also a grammaticalization process (HEINE; KUTEVA, 2007). To do so, a speech corpus representative of Brazilian Portuguese, especially the diatopy of Minas Gerais (C-ORAL-BRASIL, RASO; MELLO, 2012), was surveyed and all occurrences of the lexeme tipo were extracted. The data were then classified into four main categories, namely, full lexical item, functional item, tonal unit containing only the lexeme tipo, and tonal unit containing only the expression “tipo assim” (like that, sort of), in accordance with the features each token presented. The best prototypes of each category were presented, and the data was tabulated, and frequencies were calculated. Some subfunctions were also addressed. The data seem to confirm that there is, indeed, a grammaticalization process ongoing in BP. The frequencies of tipo operating as discursive or functional item is far above the frequency of this lexeme functioning as a full lexical item.