O uso anafórico do artigo indefinido no discurso oral de idosos do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The presented research analyzes the grammatical category of the indefinite article in its anaphoric function in 13 semi structured oral interviews produced by seniors living in Rio de Janeiro city for at least forty years. The interest in this study happens for two reasons: a) the analyzes corpus constitutes an important database of research carried out by an agreement between the University of the state of Rio de Janeiro and the Heidelberg University and treats senior discourses; b) the class of indefinite article in grammatical studies’s tradition have been relegated to a minimalist description without considering above all the discursive function of the referred class. In this way, the current research has the following general objectives: a) verify if there are linguistic patterns for anaphoric uses of the indefinite article and b) analyze, discursively, theses usages in the corpus. In order to reach the possible patterns of anaphoric uses of the indefinite article, measurements of most typical linguistic surroundings that could persuade this use in senior speech were made. For a textual discursive analysis of anaphoric uses of the indefinite article, qualitative and quantitative analysis were carried out aiming the systematization of the types of anaphoric uses of the indefinite article and its effects of meaning in the oral discourse of the interviewed seniors. From theoretical point of view, the pioneering studies about the thematic of the anaphoric use of the indefinite article performed by Kock (2004) and Cunha Lima (2004) were taken as basis. Methodologically, the program AntConc was used to promote data referred to patterns of words that occur simultaneously in the indefinite article surrounding in anaphoric function, and also to find occurrences of the use in the corpus to proceed a textual discursive analysis of the function in focus. For analysis of the investigated phenomenon, three analysis categories were defined: linguistic, functional and semantic-discursive. As a result, stand out: 1) the prevalence of the anaphoric function of the indefinite article in the semi structured interviews; 2) the seniors preferences to indefinite articles in function of recategorized anaphora to reconstruct referrings; 3) the expressiveness of the anaphoric use of the indefinite article in the semi structured interviews corpus indicates the importance of the discursive function in the project of approach between the interlocutors in an attempt to sharing essential knowledges for the communicative situation development.