Usos de vírgulas em textos do início do Ensino Fundamental II: distribuição e evidências de características prosódicas

Abstract

O objetivo deste artigo é descrever e analisar usos convencionais e não-convencionais de vírgulas de uma amostra longitudinal de textos produzidos por 94 sujeitos no ciclo inicial (6º e 7º anos) do Ensino Fundamental II de uma escola pública de São José do Rio Preto. Os textos pertencem ao Banco de Dados de Escrita do Ensino Fundamental II (TENANI; LONGHIN-THOMAZI, 2014). Ao partirmos da hipótese de que os usos de vírgulas estão associados a características prosódicas do Português Brasileiro, buscaremos descrever algumas das características prosódicas mais relevantes identificadas nas fronteiras de usos de vírgulas. Para tanto, a metodologia consiste na interface entre estruturas sintáticas, levantadas a partir das normas prescritas em Bechara (1999), e estruturas fonológicas, com base no arcabouço teórico da Fonologia Prosódica (NESPOR; VOGEL, 1986).

Commas in Texts of Students From Age 11 to 15-Years-Old: A Longitudinal Study

“…This variability in usage rules and the complex historical constitution of comma have been taken into consideration to characterize commas from various theoreticalmethodological perspectives, analyzing various materials (CHACON, 1998;CORRÊA, 2004;ESVAEL, 2005;DAHLET, 2006;PACHECO, 2006;ARAÚJO-CHIUCHI, 2012;SONCIN 2014;CARVALHO, 2019;PAIVA, 2020). In the literature about comma usage in written texts in different languages, there are also various approaches (SIMARD, 1993;CATACH, 1994, for French;CHAFE, 1988, for English;STEINHAUER;FRIEDERICI, 2001;FUCHS;KRIVOKAPIĆ, 2016, for German;CASSANY, 1999;VERDEGUER, 2010;ANDRADE, 2018, for Spanish;PRIMUS, 2007, for various languages, among others).…”

“…Within this framework, enunciations are organized in a hierarchy of seven prosodic constituents, where a higher domain is necessarily comprised in a lower one of the hierarchy (NESPOR; VOGEL, 1986). Studies which have followed this theoretical framework to address prosodic boundaries that are relevant to describe the functioning of commas in MS texts (ARAÚJO-CHIUCHI, 2012;SONCIN, 2014;CARVALHO, 2019) argue that the intonational phrase (or syntagm) domain (IP, Intonational Phrase) is the most relevant to describe uses of commas. This assertion is made based on the observation, in the above-mentioned studies, that the presence of commas occurs in positions where possible IP boundaries could be located, whereas the absence of commas tends to overlap with prosodic boundaries which potentially would not occur due to the restructuring possibilities of the IP domain, accounting for semantic and pragmatic conditions, as well as syntactic and phonological factors, which we will address ahead.…”

“…The non-conventional presence is marked by insertion of comma in boundaries which are not expected by the grammatical tradition concerning comma usage, as the separation between subject and predicate, for instance. A discussion about this case, not featured in this paper, has been made by Carvalho (2019).…”

“…According to Dahlet (2006), commas can have two ways of functioning, one being called "simple schema", when the comma delimits only the right border of a linguistic structure, and the other, "double schema", when two commas are used, one at the right border and the other at the left border of a given structure. Carvalho (2019) has analyzed occurrences of commas based on both types of schemas. From that study, we have selected the cases of commas in simple schema, given their characteristics found in the analyzed sample, to be described in the section where we present the results.…”

“…Answers to these questions shall be provided in this paper, which has been structured as follows: in the next section, we shall present the theoretical assumptions which support the study of comma as a complex linguistic object; in the section "Analysis material and methodological decisions", we describe the longitudinal text sample, provide details about the text collection process and explain the quanti-qualitative procedures followed in order to identify, gather, classify and analyze commas, performed by Carvalho (2019); in the section "Syntactic-prosodic characteristics of commas", we carry out the data analysis and discuss syntactic and prosodic characteristics detected in the presence and absence of commas in the texts of the sample. In the final section, we systematize the syntactic and prosodic complexity involved both in the presence and absence of comma in MS school texts and go a step further in regard to Carvalho (2019), by providing considerations about contributions of this research to its field of study and to future research on commas and on the relation between speech and writing, taking into account the prosodic configuration of enunciations.…”