Conceptual blending and morphological construction in the interpretation of Augusto de Campos’s poem cidade/city/cité

Abstract

This paper, which is part of my master’s thesis defended in 2019, presents the analysis of the cidade/city/cité poem, by Augusto de Campos, seeking to demonstrate how the theoretical tools of Cognitive Linguistics lends itself to describing the necessary processes for the interpretation of the most varied types of linguistic production, including poetics. Thus, the study fits the line of investigation of cognitive poetics. The poem is composed of a single neologism that can be broken down into twenty eight words, each of which forms inputs into a conceptual blending network. The mapping between inputs reveals an abstract structure to be projected into the generic space of this network. This abstract structure indicates the existence of a morphological construction of Portuguese. The study, therefore, achieves the objective of demonstrating the applicability of the theoretical framework adopted in the description of processes required in the interpretation of the type of text analyzed, as well as corroborating premises of the grammar of constructions and indicates the existence of a morphological construction in the Portuguese language.