In Brazilian Portuguese, cadê NP is a question phrase that alternates with the standard question construction onde está NP ‘where is NP?’:

 

              (1) Eu quero saber onde está / cadê minha capinha de celular que eu comprei e           nunca chega.

              ‘I want to know where my phone cover is that I bought and never arrived’.

 

              Prescriptive grammars (Neve, 2003; Preti 1999 etc.) generally state that cadê is an informal or popular version of the standard question construction. Menon (2014) traces the history of cadê and the European Portuguese equivalent quede and proposes that these expressions underwent a grammaticalization process and are the product of the phonetic erosion of the expression Que é feito de ‘What about’.

​

              In this paper I show that cadê NP has a set of pragmatic usage constraints that are not found with onde está NP. I use naturalistic data from Twitter. Consider (2), where the speaker is coming back to his home town after many years. He is walking down a street he remembers and asks his friend:

 

              (2) Cadê o café?

                   ‘Where is the coffee shop?’

 

              Here the speaker has an expectation that the coffee shop should still be located where it was before and cadê is felicitous because of this expectation. However, if the same speaker is lost in a new city and is looking for a coffee shop that was recommended to him, the use of cadê would be infelicitious, since there is no way that the speaker could have a prior expectation about where the coffee shop was located.

 

              (3) Onde está/#Cadê o café?

                   ‘Where is the coffee shop?’

 

              Note that (3) would however become felicitous in a context where the speaker did have the address of the coffee shop, arrived at said address, but did not find the coffee shop there when he arrived.

​

              In conclusion, this paper contributes to a detailed pragmatic description of a common question word in Brazilian Portuguese whose meaning has been ignored in the literature. More generally, it illustrates the kinds of pragmatic-contextual information to which question words can be sensitive and provides a model for analyzing similar expressions in other languages.

 

References:

 

de Moura Neves, M. H. (2003). Guia de uso do português: confrontando regras e usos. SciELO-Editora UNESP.

 

da Silva Menon, Odete Pereira. "Cadê e variantes: gramaticalização em língua               portuguesa." Caligrama: Revista de Estudos Românicos 19.2: 99-130.

 

PRETI, D. (1999). O discurso oral culto 2ª. ed. São Paulo: Humanitas Publicações–              FFLCH/USP.