Conceptual integration as a tool for description of some grammatical phenomena in Portuguese

The emergence of pragmatics and functional linguistics in the second half of the 20 th century – confronting the prevailing Chomskyan formal model of generative grammar – has brought new instruments that allow us to understand with advantage language in use. But there remained several unfathomable problems that only recently, with the raising of cognitive linguistics, might have been explained. The aim of this paper is just to throw some light on some already unsolved problems in Portuguese grammar, involving morphological reduction and the employment of tense and mood, using the theory of conceptual integration developed at first by Faucconier and Turner (2002) and the principle of complex systems self-organization. My statement is that the same blending principle that explains, for instance, conceptual metaphors and metonymy can easily be utilized for elucidating compound-noun reductions, polite and hypothetical uses of some verb tenses as well as the use of the so-called historical present employed when narrating past events and, even more, the apparent clash between subjunctive mood in concessive clause and its original hypothetical meaning.