Conjunções na estrutura do texto: um estudo do uso de conectivos em textos dissertativo-argumentativos

Abstract

The present study investigates the use of conjunction-type connective in argumentative and dissertation texts, to verify their quantitative and qualitative aspects of occurrences and patterns of use related to textual structures. The problem addressed here fits into the theoretical field of language studies in use, which appeared in the mid-1960s, whose conceptual and methodological framework continues to be very productive for textual studies (MODESTO, 2006), and its application is welcome on language description and education works. The literature review included the study of connective and conjunctional taxonomy, according to Houaiss (2001), Villar (2001), Castilho (2017), Cunha (2017) and Savioli (2007); as well as the point of view of Koch (2017) and others, who consider that the connective connectors type have an important impact on the construction of meaning in the text. The corpus of 10 randomly selected essays was token from the 1000 essay database of the research project “Automatic evaluation of answers to non-objective questions through intelligent methods”, UFPA, 2017-2018. These essays were sectioned according to the organizational structure of the argumentative and dissertation text, postulated by Fiorin (2018): introduction, development and conclusion. In each section, once the occurrences of conjunctions were identified, the period of each occurrence was isolated, in order to observe, in each case, aspects of the coherence of the construction. With these periods and their conjunctions, for each section of the 10 essays, tables and graphs were constructed, which allowed a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the findings. The Results indicated that conjunctions occur more frequently in development, followed by conclusion and introduction; occurrences of the forms “when”, “but”, “for”, “nevertheless”, “therefore”, “also” and “or… or”; It was noteworthy that conclusive conjunctions (“therefore” and “thus”) were presented in the introduction of 3 (three) of the analyzed texts and the development of 2 (two) others. Finally, the isolated periods are generally considered to be following local coherence conditions, and the global coherence in each text showed that conclusive conjunctions present meanings as cause, justification, consequence and retaking, portraying the multifunctionality.