| Resumo | In present-day Portuguese, the so-called shell noun construction (cf. Schmid 2000) comes in four main variants, N de que, N de + inflected infinitive, N de + (uninflected) infinitive, and N é que. In the medieval language, however, the situation is quite different: one of the most typical shell nouns of today, facto/fato is not attested in any of these constructions, and the N de que construction does not exist. Instead what we find are examples such as (1), where the nouns seem to constitute a complex predicate: (1) E cada hûa das partes avya grande võõtade de vencer o campo. (CP, 13:CIPM:CGEsp) ‘And both parties had a great will to gain the terrain.’ This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of the shell noun construction(s) in Portuguese from the perspective of nine nouns: mercê ‘mercy’, razão ‘reason’, vontade ‘wish’, which are representative of the medieval period (14th century); sinal ‘signal’, caso ‘case’ and temor ‘fear’, representative of the intermediate period (16th and 17th century); and facto ‘fact’, ideia ‘idea’ and questão ‘question’ (20th century). The typical shell nouns for each period were determined by performing century-wise collostructional analyses (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) on data extracted from the Corpus do Português (Davies & Ferreira 2006-). By examining the use of the nine nouns, I will show how the specific constructions evolve over time. For example, both facto and ideia first appear in the N é que and the de + infinitive constructions in the 17th century, respectively, but they do not generalize in the other constructions until the 19th century. Sinal, on the other hand, is first used in the N de que and the N é que construction (15th century), but only appears in the N de que and the N de + infinitive construction in present day language. |
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