A estrutura tópico-comentário no português brasileiro: a organização informacional da sentença

Abstract

The present study aims at analyzing sentence constructions of commentary topic , marked-topic and unmarked topic in textual productions of students attending the last four years of elementary education in a public school located in a poor community in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. 316 out of 1040 productions have been analyzed. Functionalism has been used as the theoretical background with special emphasis on three different types of subject the Logical Subject, the Psychological Subject and the Grammatical Subject - Halliday (1994) and on Lambrecht s information structure (1994). Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, we have investigated, on the one hand, the percentage of marked and non-marked topic construction appearances and, on the other hand, the different types of non-marked topics and the syntactic and pragmatic discursive motivations of their usage. The analysis has been done in two stages. Firstly, for the identification and quantification of sentence constructions of marked topics, the investigation of the following variables has been made: 1st) most recurrent marked topic, according to specific categorization referring to the topic and its argumentative relationship with the verb, 2nd) most frequent position, taking into account the textual structure and the syntactic ambience of favoring the use of the coreferent pronoun (presence / absence of the syntagma or intercalated clause between sentence topic and coreferent pronoun). In order to investigate favoring contexts of the use of non-marked topics of 3rd person full pronominal subject and 3rd person null pronominal subject, the following variables have been considered: 1st) type of clause and 2nd) discursive connection, Paredes Silva (2003). The results obtained allow us to systematize the use conditions of the studied structures. When it comes to the sentence constructions of marked topic, we could perceive that it is a strategy of activating in the discourse the element about which the new information will be transmitted, marking it as the sentence topic. When it comes to non-marked topics, the strategies of use are related to the type of clause and to the degree of discursive connection of the sentence. The use of the null subject is directly related to the discursive connection degree 1, which is considered great. A brief analysis of such constructions in works of renowned authors in the field of Brazilian literature and other contemporary Brazilian authors allow us to say that topic constructions, especially the ones that contain marked topics, deserve greater attention in the education of Portuguese language, since they represent a pragmatic discursive strategy which is relevant and commonly used in interactional processes. Therefore, the study of topic construction deserves special attention since it reflects the richness of our language when it represents a pragmatic discursive strategy that, if well developed, can be one more tool for the language user when it comes to the conscientious and competent use of the mother tongue