Pergunta se macaco quer banana! Breve análise de frases feitas jocosas: estudo da língua em uso com o auxílio da Lingüística de Corpus

Abstract

Although the interest in phraseology has grown in recent years, a lot of research remains to be carried out on certain formulaic expressions, mainly in Brazilian Portuguese. This paper sets out to briefly investigate a very specific type of situational formulae, namely: stock conversational witticisms. This article  focuses on a series of intuitively collected stock conversational witticisms in Brazilian Portuguese, discusses their classification, analyses them in their pragmatic function, and still, verifies how they are treated in three major dictionaries as well as in two computerized corpora, both in Portuguese, by using Corpus Linguistics as the main methodology. Our first analysis showed that such dictionaries and corpora do not include the stock conversational witticisms in question. This led us to investigate them on the Web. Among the various types of sites, most of the stock conversational witticisms were observed in blogs. Our findings reveal, among other things, that  the Web, specially the blogs, seem to be a suitable and large repository of such expressions; that some of the phrases are not even on the Web; and that most of the expressions are indeed used by speakers. Besides, some of the expressions were found with variations in their structure, signaling that their level of fixedness is not as high as supposed.