Functional grammar currently has a great acceptance in linguistics, mainly because it can enlighten grammatical facts' motivation in the structure of a text. From its emergence, the tradition of studying grammar by grammar has come to an end. Demonstrative pronouns, for instance, have begun to be viewed as efficient tools of text cohesion, used to resume terms from previous clauses. This task, however, ends up leaving an endless trail of "black boxes." How is it possible to explain the origin of demonstratives' anaphoric functioning if they are originally used to indicate things or people relative to the interlocutors' spatial position? This work aims at showing that Cognitive Linguistics arises just as an option for opening those "black boxes." This article focuses on one of its themes - the conceptual blending theory - to support this possibility. Firstly, it was necessary to integrate the cognitive model into the complexity theory, according to Bybee (2010) and Castilho (2009), who understand language as a complex adaptive system. After that, a brief updated description on the conceptual blending theory is made and its application in some grammatical facts of the Brazilian Portuguese language is suggested under the morphological and syntactic levels.
Conceptual integration; Blending; Complexity; Portuguese grammar
