| Summary: | <p class="p1">The study of language change from a constructionist framework has been developed at least since a decade ago (Diewald 2006, Bergs and Diewald<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>2008, Traugott 2008, among others). In this paper, we have chosen a constructionalization perspective (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) for a diachronic analysis of the development of the temporal connector <em>na hora que </em>in the Portuguese Language (PL) (Longhin-Thomazi 2011). As a hypothesis, we propose that this connector has originated from an expression that indicated the meaning of <em>momento</em>. Over time, the expression has undergone gradual constructional changes until it was constructionalized under the sense of the conjunction <em>quando</em>. In order to test this hypothesis, we selected two <em>corpora </em>and two databases: Colonia: Corpus of Historical Portuguese (Zampieri and Becker 2013) and C-ORAL-BRASIL (Raso and Mello 2012); Corpus Informatizado do Português Medieval (Xavier and Crispim 2002) and Corpus do Português (Davies and Ferreira 2006), which allowed access to a set of approximately 52.3 million words from the PL, covering the period from the 12<span class="s1">th </span>to the 21<span class="s1">st </span>centuries. The results showed that the <em>cline </em>of the constructionalization of this connector would be represented as: <em>em hora que </em>(<em>no momento que</em>) > <em>na hora que </em>(<em>no momento que</em>) > <em>na hora que </em>(<em>quando</em>). Admitting post-constructional changes, two forms would be added <em>a hora que </em>> <em>hora que</em>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
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