Grammar in the mind and in the society: evidence from European and Brazilian pluricentric Portuguese

This study aims to highlight the relationship between grammar, cognition, and society, identifying cognitive and social processes applied to grammatical constructions in Portuguese. It follows the theoretical framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics and presents corpus-based empirical evidence from pluricentric variation between European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). First, we identify the main cognitive operations that make grammar an efficient system of conceptual structuring and communication, namely conceptual perspectivization, discourse construction of mental spaces, and inferencing. We also consider how these cognitive operations are conditioned by sociocultural factors and by processes of communicative efficiency, hence the necessary systematic inclusion of language-internal variation in grammar. We will then present the main characteristics of the pluricentricity of Portuguese, specially the diachronic divergence between EP and BP. Finally, we will illustrate the cognitive and social principles of grammar and their correlations with two brief analyses of constructional variation in Portuguese, which are part of our sociocognitive and lectometric research on divergence between EP and BP: se constructions (reflexive/reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive, and impersonal) and their alternation with null clitic constructions, and prepositional relative constructions and their chopping and resumptive variants.