Prosa argumentativa em língua inglesa: um estudo contrastivo sobre advérbios em corpora digitais

Abstract

This research investigates how Brazilian learners of English use adverbs ending in-ly in written English and compares their use to that of speakers of English as a mother tongue. To this end, the work resorts to Corpus Linguistics as both theoretical and methodological support. The research is based on the area called Learner Corpora Research, which deals with the collection, storage and analysis of linguistic data produced by learners of a foreign language, which can then be used for descriptive and teaching purposes. This area aims to identify ways in which learners use of the foreign language is different or similar to that of native speakers. The data used in this research are the corpus of study (Br-ICLE), containing written English produced by Brazilian learners, built according to the ICLE project (International Corpus of Learner English), as well as two reference corpora (Locness and BAWE) containing written English produced by speakers of English as a mother tongue. The results indicate that Brazilian learners overuse the categories of adverbs that indicate truth, reality and intensity in comparison to the use made by native speakers, furthermore they use these adverbs in different ways. The results also suggest that, given the differences in frequency (either by overuse or underuse of adverbs), the learners tend to misuse combinations in terms of collocates or in terms of semantic prosody. And finally, the research reveals that the preference of learners for adverbs expressing truth, reality and intensity creates the impression of very assertive voices. We conclude that these differences may be related to factors such as the size of the corpus, the influence of the learners mother tongue, the internalization of linguistic elements needed to produce a text in a foreign language or even the lack of fluency of the learners and the classroom context in the universities