Modal words in Brazilian Portuguese

perspectives for categorization and pragmatic analysis

Abstract

This article investigates the possibilities of categorizing modal particles (MPs) in Brazilian Portuguese, taking as reference the criteria already established for German MPs. The study begins with the observation that, while German presents a well-defined grammatical class of MPs, with specific syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties, Portuguese lacks a systematic description that allows them to be distinguished from their homonyms. The research focuses on the use of the word mas, analyzed in contrast with aber (German), pero (Spanish), and but (English). The theoretical framework combines the Minimalist Approach (Diewald, 2013; Aquino, 2023), which defines MPs by their nuclear communicative function and contextual dependence, with Theory of Mind (Abraham; Leiss, 2012), which conceives such elements as linguistic cues for the activation of shared mental representations between interlocutors. In this sense, MPs are understood as pragmatic operators that modulate the illocutionary force of utterances, signaling specific communicative functions. Methodologically, the study employs the Descriptive Format (Diewald et al., 2017), a tool that organizes the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of each element, here applied to Brazilian mas. For the analysis, authentic examples drawn from social media and multimodal materials were used, illustrating the functioning of mas as an MP in interrogative and declarative contexts. The contrastive analysis revealed that, although there is no direct correspondence across languages, functional recurrences indicate the universal role of MPs as mediators of discourse interaction. The results show that mas can operate beyond the propositional level, fulfilling the communicative function of signaling expectation violation, epistemic alignment, and directive orientation. This characterization distinguishes it both from its homonym (the adversative conjunction) and from the category of discourse markers, still often conflated in the literature. The study concludes that Brazilian Portuguese, although it does not have a rigidly codified grammatical class of MPs, presents elements that perform equivalent functions, with mas as a paradigmatic example. This research contributes to the pragmatic description of the language, reinforces the relevance of contrastive approaches, and opens avenues for investigating other potential MPs in Portuguese, while also suggesting pedagogical and typological implications for language teaching and comparative studies.