On the trail of ‘tomara (que)’ from the 13th to the 20th century: from grammaticalized construction to interjection

Abstract

Through data analysis from the 13th to the 20th century, available in the ‘Corpus do Português’ database, we deal with the construction ‘tomara (que)’ linked to four parallel processes that led it to the expression of desire in Portuguese: (i) expansion of semantic fields; (ii) expression of irrealis modality (through the conjunctive, conditional and volitive values); (iii) paradigmatic narrowing to the first person and (iv) selection of an inalienable argument or one referring to a state of affairs. Theoretically, we looked for classifications of ‘tomara’ in the grammatical literature and based ourselves on postulates in a constructionist approach, as the form-function pairing, which is essential for understanding the route from the grammaticalized construction ‘tomara (que)’ to the interjection. We considered 956 data, observing that the construction began to be used from the 16th century onward, with the meaning of desire, although there are a few earlier modal uses. At the same time, we observed uses of ‘tomara’ predominantly in the first-person postposed, in addition to a greater incidence of an inalienable internal argument or referring to a state of affairs in recent centuries. Semantic spreading, modal value, paradigmatic narrowing and metaphorization contribute to the grammaticalization of the structure, although the argument selection typical of more distant uses persists, that means the construction continues to select a sentence object, until it becomes an interjection itself.