Abordagem funcionalista da oração adjetiva: descrição e ensino

Abstract

In this research, we develop an interface between the description and the teaching of relative clause. We intend to describe its morphosyntactic, semantic and discursive-pragmatic aspects and to improve the teaching of this grammatical topic through a functionalist approach. The theoretical support is the North American Functional Linguistics, inspired by Givón, Bybee, Traugott, among others. It also considers orientations from the guiding documents of Portuguese Language teaching for Basic Education: National Curricular Guidelines (BRASIL, 2006) and the Common National Curricular Base (BRASIL, 2018). The relative clause description, based on functionalist researches, such as Oliveira (2001), Bispo (2009, 2014a, b, 2018) and Souza (2009), contemplates various aspects, related to the level of morphosyntactic embedding, semantic classification, relativization strategies, among others. In terms of Portuguese teaching, documents orient that the practice of linguistic analysis can expand possibilities of language use, increasing student’s critical capacity. This research has as general hypothesis that the functionalist description and analysis of relatives clauses contemplates the different ways of organization of this orational type as well as structural and functional aspects linked to these forms of expression and that the approach to adjectives in classrooms, by this perspective, should start from effective uses of these forms, whether canonical or not, associating them to the different communicative contexts and to the effects of meaning that one intends to achieve. From this, it was elaborated a didactic proposal that was applied in elementary and high school classes of a state public school in Natal/RN. It is an eminently qualitative and quantitative research, considering interpretation and analysis of the material obtained during the application of the proposal. As for the description of the adjective, this thesis resulted in the proposal of an integration continuum based on discussions about the different configurations of the adjective in functionalist research. The criteria for definitiveness of the antecedent NP (Nominal Phrase), informativeness of the antecedent NP, presence/absence of relative pronoun, background of relative clause, pause, insertion and syntactic rupture were considered. The relative clauses were arranged in this sequence from the lowest to the highest level of embedding: untied relative clause > prototypical finite nonrestrictive relative > non-finite non-restrictive relative > non-prototypical finite non-restrictive relative > headless relative > non-prototypical finite restrictive relative > prototypical finite restrictive relative > non-finite restrictive relative. Regarding the didactic proposal, results show that, after classes based on the functional approach, most students were able to correlate linguistic uses with cognitive and communicative motivations regarding the different modes of organization of relative clauses and, in particular, the use of different relativization strategies. In addition, the results denote the need for adjustments due to the reality of the classes and to the attendance of the theoretical bases that supported the intervention. Such adjustments include, for example, the time allotted for activities and the readjustment of some exercise questions.