Alternância no uso dos modos indicativo e subjuntivo em orações subordinadas substantivas: uma comparação entre o português do Brasil e o francês do Canadá

The purpose of this work is to analyze the use of the indicative mood, instead of the subjunctive prescribed by the normative grammar, in complement clauses introduced by the conjunction que in Brazilian Portuguese. Contexts of use of the subjunctive according to grammatical prescription, and contexts of fluctuation on the use of that verbal mood were analyzed, in an attempt to investigate what interferes on the choice of the mood by the user of the language. This study is based on North-American Functional Linguistics theoretical perspective, oriented to analyzing language in use, in the light of the principles of grammaticalization and markedness. The results obtained support that the contexts that favor the indicative over the subjunctive are those composed by a complement clause functioning as a direct object the unmarked clause of all complement clauses and by a verb on the main sentence that belongs to the semantic field of low certainty, corresponding to the epistemic sub-mode the unmarked category of the deontic sub-mode. The results indicate that pragmatics and semantics factors influence the language user on the choice of the verbal mood. This research also presents comparative data on the use of the indicative mood in place of the subjunctive in Brazilian Portuguese and Canadian French, aiming to providing suggestions on language teaching

Variação, mudança e ensino: o caso dos pronomes possessivos da gente e nosso(a)(s) em uma abordagem sociofuncionalista

In this work, we analyze the variation and change phenomenon involving the possessive pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) in the light of the theoretical referentials of the North-american linguistic functionalism and of the variationist sociolinguistics. At first we present the phenomenon itself, highlighting the fact that few studies have considered it as an object, gap which we will try to fill in with our contribution. In the following chapter, we emphasize concepts and principles of the functionalism and the sociolinguistics that are used as our background for the data analysis. In the third chapter, we present what the normative grammars inform about our object of study, besides synthesizing some works on variation and change involving the personal pronouns nós and a gente. In the following chapter, we analyze the data. We used data from the Discurso & Gramática a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998) corpus. In this chapter we present the results for the groups of social and linguistic factors which we can control. Grounded on these results, we specify the preferential contexts for employing the pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) and we observe that the social motivations, the valorization credited to the forms and the identity marks underly the restrictions exercised in their use by social factor groups, besides obtaining signs of ongoing changes in apparent time (from the age factor groups) and possible use specializations of each form, what helped us verify the course of the grammaticalization process of the referred pronouns in the community of Natal. In the sixth chapter, we make some considerations on the teaching of grammar and propose activities which can be carried on in the classroom involving the possessive pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) considering the variation and change issue