O papel dos conectivos na coesão textual e o ensino de produção escrita em língua inglesa: uma análise baseada na Linguística de Corpus.

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the frequency of use and syntactic patterns of seven categories of linking adverbials to achieve textual cohesion in editorials in English. The analysis is based on the theoretical methodology of Corpus Linguistics (SINCLAIR, 1991; BERBER SARDINHA, 2004). The corpus analyzed, the corpus NYT-OPED, was collected specifically for this research, and it is composed of 590 editorials published in the section Opinion of the North American newspaper The New York Times between January and July of 2021. The categories of linking adverbials analyzed were enumeration, addition, summation, apposition, result, contrast/concession, and transition according to the categorization proposed by Biber (1999). The results of the research indicate that the frequency of linking adverbials in the corpus is relatively low and their use in the building of textual cohesion is one of the various strategies used by the authors. The most frequent category was linking adverbials of apposition and the less frequent category was linking adverbials of conclusion. According to the analysis, there was a low frequency of linking adverbials of conclusion to introduce the concluding paragraph of the texts. The linking adverbials of conclusion, when present, were used to conclude an argument in different parts of the texts. The evidence from this research leads to questioning the focus commonly placed by textbooks on teaching linking adverbials as the main tools for textual cohesion.