LIMA, M.S.A.; http://lattes.cnpq.br/2875136323254940; LIMA, Magna Simone Albuquerque de.
Resumo:
In this study, we investigate the working of lexical-grammatical category of
transitivity to build opinion in texts produced by elementary school students of a
public school in Campina Grande, in order to suggest treatment approaches for
grammatical feature at this level of education. Specifically, we attempted to reach
three objectives: (i) to investigate the role of the transitivity system, especially the
processes and participants elements, in building opinion in written texts, (ii) to
analyze the semantic-grammatical patterns in textual characterization, (iii) to
propose approaches to teach transitivity. For that, this study is based on Systemic
Functional Grammar, especially those studies related to multifunctional language
and Transitivity System. In this perspective, language is understood as a social
semiotic system that is organized semantically to achieve communicative goals
and grammar is seen as a source of meaning. This research is a descriptiveinterpretative
of quantitative and qualitative nature, whose corpus is composed by
twenty-four texts produced by students belonged to 8th grade class. In these texts,
we selected a total of nineteen processes, performed in sixty-three clauses
analyzed. The discussion of data revealed that the in the construction of opinion
presented in the texts, made by means of a semantic-grammatical patterning,
processes and participants worked with the following functions: (i) material
processes serve mostly to represent obligatory actions, (ii) relational processes
work to qualify the opinion and describe the writer (iii) mental processes express
the writer's position about the subject matter discussed, (iv) verbal processes are
used to present an authority voice and support the arguments (v) existential
processes built an flow of information to build the opinion, (vi) participants
represent both collective actors belonging to social class and individual ones,
showing writer's involvement with speech presented, mainly, by a negative
connotation. From this language configuration, we could observe appropriate
motions of approximation and distance between the students' text and tne opinion
article, used as previous production context, which indicates the students' ability to
handle the linguistic phenomena according to the interaction context. With this, we
tackled the treatment of transitivity in the school, based on the immediate
production context, related to the contextual dimension of Field, emphasizing the
dependence between the textual and contextual levels for the determination of
linguistic choices, in an attempt to offer an opportunity for a reflexive study of
transitivity and, as consequence, to improve grammar teaching.