O uso dos conectores em textos dissertativo-argumentativos de alunos do ensino médio de uma escola pública de Manaus

Abstract

This study has examined the use of connectors in texts of high school students of a public school in the city of Manaus. The analysis was based on thirty compositions collected in classes from first to third grades. The texts were chosen according to the gender of the student and the order in which they were handed, in order to observe the use that students make of interphrasal connectors. The hypothesis is that the use of connectors is related to three linguistic factors: i) the degree of dependency and embedding of sentences; ii) the grammaticalization process of interphrasal connection elements; iii) the use of the lexicogrammatical elements that mark the dissertative-argumentative text. The concept of text and, more specifically, the notion of text genre were discussed, once every textual practice takes place from some genre. This study has approached the characteristics of the dissertative-argumentative genre, which is commonly found in the school essay writing practices of the students who have a relative knowledge of that text genre. Besides, the notion of textual connection was also taken into consideration, following the principles of: Textual Linguistics, which classifies the connection elements into logical-semantic operators and argumentative operators, according to Beaugrande, Koch, Favero and Marcuschi; and also the principles of Functionalist Grammar, especially the ones proposed by Hooper & Traugott, Givón, Neves, and Castilho, who work with the notion that the connecting elements are in a continuum that goes from subordination to hypotaxis until it reaches the parataxis, in accordance with the degree of dependence and clausal embedding. Moreover, the concepts of grammaticalization and discoursivization were of fundamental importance to explain the functioning, use, change and significance of certain connectors investigated in this study.