A gramaticalização de informação: uma abordagem sociocognitiva

Abstract

Information is a concept and a lexical item that emerges when a “change in communication technology” occurs: it emerged with the invention of the greek alphabet, with the introduction of writing in Portugal (14º century) and, as it seems, in our era, with the new information and communication technologies (ICT). With the introduction of writing in an oral society, the term becomes useful to understand a notion of reality based on a subject-object dualism. That doesn’t mean a change in human cognition, but a “enrichment” of the language in order to perform a new myth, a world of things that speak for themselves, a “world of forms”, as we named it. In this context of spoken-written language (sound-vision) transition, the lexical item information is reified, that means, it starts being considered a “mental object” with some specific features: information is the content of a created form, it borns when a “state of things” is caught by sight; mold is what shapes the matter “state of things” and gives rise to a created form. Under the analytical perspective of Sociocognitive Linguistics, we point out the “conduit metaphor” as the association that maps the most salient features of the grammaticalization enformação “molding” >>> informação “state of things”: on the one hand, it defines information as content, on the other hand, it associates information with the term transference, allowing us to finally understand the polysemy of the term.