The Back-and-Forth of assim que in the History of Portuguese

Bibliographic Data

ID19487476
AuthorsAroldo De Andrade (0000-0002-1354-7916, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, corresponding author), Glayson Martins Oliveira (Faculdade de Letras, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte 31270-901, MG, Brazil), Glayson Martins de Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Year2026
Volume11
Issue3
Pages57
Publication date2026-03-16
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages11030057
OpenAlexW7136364528
LanguageEN
References cited18

This paper investigates the diachronic development of the sequence assim que (lit. ‘such that’) in the history of Portuguese, with a comparative perspective on the parallel construction así que in Spanish. A corpus-based approach was employed, analyzing approximately 1800 tokens from the Corpus do Português: Historical Genres, spanning eight centuries of written European Portuguese. The results show that assim que remained highly analyzable until the end of the Old Portuguese period, with the adverb assim often followed by a complement or result clause. The grammaticalization of assim que appears to have evolved partly independently from standalone assim. While Portuguese and Spanish share many uses of the construction, modern European Portuguese has diverged, with assim que losing its status as a discourse marker. This change is best explained by the frequent use of cleft constructions (e.g., foi assim que), which reanalyzed que as a subordinating connector, undoing the earlier single-unit interpretation. These findings suggest that even deeply entrenched grammaticalization processes may undergo retraction when the semantic analyzability of component elements allows it

Adverb · Complement (music) · Component (thermodynamics) · Frontier · Grammaticalization · Historical linguistics · Perspective (graphical) · Portuguese · Sequence (biology) · Linguistics and Language Studies · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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