A unidade informacional de introdutor locutivo no português brasileiro: uma análise baseada em corpus

Abstract

This study has, as its aim, the analysis of the informational unit used to indicate that the locutive space which follows contains a unitary point of view which differs from the rest of the text. This unit is named Locutive Introducer according to the Language in Act Theory, theoretical basis for this study. The Language in Act Theory departs from Austins Theory of Speech Acts and it analyses the informational structure of an utterance taking into account the prosodic interface between locution and illocution. An utterance is understood here as the smallest pragmatically interpretable linguistic sequence, i.e., any expression that has pragmatic autonomy to perform an illocution. Therefore, the utterance exists irrespective of its syntactic composition or its semantic autonomy. For this study, a subcorpus was analyzed. It consisted of 10 texts with around 1500 words each, extracted from C-ORAL-BRASIL, a corpus of BrazilianPortuguese spontaneous speech, representative of the diatopy of Minas Gerais and containing the widest possible diaphasic variation, aiming at obtaining a broad range of illocutions and informational structures. The C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus has the same architecture and the same segmentation criteria of the C-ORAL-ROM, 4 European Romance language corpora: French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. This work enlists the functional, distributional, prosodic, morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics of the Locutive Introducer in Brazilian Portuguese. Those characteristics are compared to the characteristics of the same unit in Italian, a language to which the same theoretical basis has been applied. For the prosodic analysis, the software WinPitch and Praat wereused, through which the variation of average of F0 as well as the velocity of elocution of the unit in relation to the rest of the utterance were measured. Some conclusions that can be drawn from the study are that the Locutive Introducer is more often used in Brazilian Portuguese than in Italian and that in most cases the unit introduces the metaillocutionof reported speech. Not only do the results here achieved contribute to thestudy of informational structure of Brazilian Portuguese spontaneous speech and to the linguistic intercomparison of languages to which the same theoretical basis has been applied, but it also emphasizes the relevance of pragmatic approaches to the analysis of linguistic phenomena hardly ever explainable by a syntactic approach.