Contextual analysis of the construction [à medida que] conect

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to investigate the formation of the construction [à medida que] conect , from the perspective of Usage-Based Functional Linguistics. The focus is the study of contexts (normal, atypical, critical and isolated) and the process of constructionalization, which includes the formation of a new language node. Based on data from the Corpus do Português, we conducted a research, in a qualitative and quantitative approach, from the 15th to the 20th century. The results show that the construction [à medida que] conect was formed and conventionalized in Portuguese, with proportional value, in more recent synchronies , through the general domain process called chunking.