Systemic organization of Predication and Identification in the grammar of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims at systemic functional descriptions of the textual systems available in Brazilian Portuguese for grammaticalizing the meanings of focus in the clause. The study draws on a sample of texts retrieved from CALIBRA, a monolingual corpus of Brazilian Portuguese designed according to a context-based typology of texts. The texts were analyzed and annotated according to systemic functional categories. Results showed two independent systems responsible for grammaticalizing focus, PREDICATION for clause elements and IDENTIFICATION for whole clauses. PREDICATION organizes ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings distributing information as prominent or non-prominent. IDENTIFICATION is the result of a complex operation, involving choices at clause and group/word ranks, namely equation and nominalization. These findings point to a multi-system grammaticalization of identifi cation focus.