Discourse Relations in Adverbial Gerundive Clauses: contributions from a corpus analysis in different varieties of Portuguese
Abstract
This work presents a study of discourse relations (DRs) in adverbial gerundive clauses (AGC) in different varieties of Portuguese (European, Angolan and Mozambican) with the aim of verifying to what extent the theoretical proposal by Cunha and Silvano (2009) allows explaining the regularities observed in the semantics of sentences with AGC. For this purpose, data were collected and recorded following the methodology presented in Silvano et al. (2023). Thus, after collecting complex sentences with clauses with the compound gerund from a web crawling system, 150 sentences taken from current newspapers were annotated. The annotation followed the ISO 24617-8 standard and allowed the identification of the most frequent DRs, as well as the preferred position of AGC in the sentence and the most common temporal relations that these constructions establish with the matrix clause. Additionally, these results were compared with data already available in the DRIPPS corpus (Silvano et al., 2023) relating to the same varieties of Portuguese, discussing the implications of the overlap of the results found in both studies, particularly regarding the (non-)causal nature of AGC. Considering the data gathered in the present study and following the proposal of Cunha and Silvano (2009), we affirm that AGC preferentially introduce DRs that are established at the level of the external structure of the predications and whose inference depends on the temporal organization of the situations involved. In short, this work contributes to knowledge about the topic of DRs in the context of AGC and to the semantic characterization of these same constructions, laying some foundations for future work.
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