O conector por isso e a veiculação de sentidos de esclarecimento, exposição e exemplificação sob olhar pancrônico

In previous papers, Lopes and Rabello (2022, 2024), based on the postulates os Sweetser (1990), distribute the uses of [por isso]connector in the three domains of causality: content, epistemic and speech acts. To the first, they associate the semantic value of consequence; to the second, that of conclusion; to the last, that of elaboration, which represents a semantic macrocategory (cf. Halliday, 2004) that comprises the relations of clarification, exposition and exemplification. In this text we turn specifically to the investigation and description of these last three semantic values in a panchronic perspective, motivated by the fact that there is still a certain gap in the grammatical and linguistic literature regarding the description of other relations in the domain of causality beyond the well-known notions of cause, conclusion and consequence. In this sense, our aim is to describe the trajectory of change in the function of elaboration in the uses of [por isso]connector. To this end, we analyzed 917 usage data, retrieved from the Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval, Corpus Vercial and Corpus NOW databases, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Usage- Based Linguistics (cf. Cunha et al., 2013) and Pragmatics (cf. Sweetser, 1990). The results suggest that the elaborative function is the result of the trajectory of change of [por isso]connector. They also suggest that clarification is the prototypical and most frequent value of the macrocategory.