Advérbio em –mente: processo morfológico concluído ou em andamento?

This paper aims at investigating the morphological construction of adverbs with a final –mente in Portuguese. We intend to highlight that the morpheme –mente, categorized as a suffix by the traditional grammar, does not function as other suffixes, thus indicating that the gramaticalization of –mente is not a concluded process, but is rather found midway in the continuum proposed by Meillet (apud CHRISTIANO et al., 2004, p. 18) towards total gramaticalization. The approach used in this study is mostly descriptive, grounded on the theoretical assumptions of structuralism and functionalism.