Transitividade no texto opinativo: descrição de seu uso e implicações para o estudo desta categoria no ensino fundamental.

Abstract

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.