The paths of where in Brazilian Portuguese: linguistic tools and linguistic change

Abstract

The present work – focusing the use of where in Brazilian Portuguese - is a topic in a research whose goal is to study, from data gathered in written documents that (supposedly) employ an educated standard of Brazilian Portuguese, tendencies to changes in use at a number of levels (lexical, morpho-syntactic, semantic, discursive), trying to specify discursive factors of such changes. The analysis of the corpus shows a gradual distancing in relation to what linguistic tools recommend, pointing to a use in which one finds semantic dispersion and sliding, thus showing that in addition to references of where and of time, there are cases of reference of process, of means or starting point and of explanation that has as its scope a significant sequence.