Grammar and disciplinary culture : a corpus-based study

The present study provides a usage-based account of how three grammatical structures, declarative content clauses, interrogative content clause and as-predicative constructions, are used in academic research articles. These structures may be used in both knowledge claims and citations, and they often express evaluative meanings. Using the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics, I investigate how the culture of the academic discipline influences the way in which these constructions are used in research articles. The study compares the rates of occurrence of these grammatical structures and investigates their co-occurrence patterns in articles representing four different disciplines (medicine, physics, law, and literary criticism). The analysis is based on a purpose-built 2-million-word corpus, which has been part-of-speech tagged. The analysis demonstrates that the use of these grammatical structures varies between disciplines, and further shows that the differences observed in the corpus data are linked with differences in the nature of knowledge and the patterns of enquiry. The constructions in focus tend to be more frequently used in the soft disciplines, law and literary criticism, where their co-occurrence patterns are also more varied. This reflects both the greater variety of topics discussed in these disciplines, and the higher frequency of references to statements made by other researchers. Knowledge-building in the soft fields normally requires a careful contextualisation of the arguments, giving rise to statements reporting earlier research employing the constructions in focus. In contrast, knowledgebuilding in the hard fields is typically a cumulative process, based on agreed-upon methods of analysis. This characteristic is reflected in the structure and contents of research reports, which offer fewer opportunities for using these constructions.

Mauwake reference grammar

This dissertation provides a synchronic grammatical description of Mauwake, a Papuan (Trans-New Guinea) language of about 2000 speakers on the North Coast of the Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. The theoretical background is that of Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT), used extensively in analysing and writing descriptive grammars. The chapters from morphology to clause level are described from form to function; in the later chapters the function is taken more often as the starting point. Any theory-specific terminology is kept to the minimum and formalisms have been avoided in accordance with BLT principles. Mauwake has a classic 5-vowel system and 14 consonant phonemes. With its simple phonology it is a typical representative of the Madang North Coast languages. For a Papuan language there are relatively few morphophonological alternations. Nouns are either alienably or inalienably possessed. There is no obligatory number marking in nouns or noun phrases. Pronouns have several different forms: five for case and three for other functions. The dative pronouns are treated as [+human] locatives, and they have also grammaticalised as possessives. The verbal morphology is agglutinative and mainly suffixal. Unusual features include two distributive suffixes, and the interaction of the derivational benefactive and the inflectional beneficiary suffixes. The applicative suffix has either transitivising or causative but not benefactive function. The switch-reference system distinguishes between simultaneous and sequential action, as well as same or different subject in relation to the following clause. There are several verbs denoting coming and going, and they may combine with one of three prefixes to indicate bringing and taking. Mauwake is a nominative-accusative type language, and the basic constituent order in a clause is SOV. Subject and object are the only syntactic arguments. There is no indirect object, but a clause can have two or even three objects. A nominalised clause with a finite verb functions as a relative clause or a complement clause; one with a nominalised verb has several different functions. Functional domains described include modality, negation, deixis, quantification, possession and comparison. As there are four negators, Mauwake has more variation in negative expressions than is usual in Papuan languages. Clause chaining is the preferred strategy for joining clauses into sentences, but coordination and subordination of finite clauses are also common. The form of a complement clause depends on whether it is of the fact, action or potential type. Tail-head linkage is used as a cohesive device between sentences. The discourse-level features described are topic and focus.

A Sketch of the Phonology and Grammar of Rajbanshi

This dissertation is a synchronic description of the phonology and grammar of two dialects of the Rajbanshi language (Eastern Indo-Aryan) as spoken in Jhapa, Nepal. I have primarily confined the analysis to the oral expression, since the emerging literary form is still in its infancy. The grammatical analysis is therefore based, for the most part, on a corpus of oral narrative text which was recorded and transcribed from three informants from north-east Jhapa. An informant, speaking a dialect from south-west Jhapa cross checked this text corpus and provided additional elicited material. I have described the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language, and also one aspect of its discourse structure. For the most part the phonology follows the basic Indo-Aryan pattern. Derivational morphology, compounding, reduplication, echo formation and onomatopoeic constructions are considered, as well as number, noun classes (their assignment and grammatical function), pronouns, and case and postpositions. In verbal morphology I cover causative stems, the copula, primary and secondary agreement, tense, aspect, mood, auxiliary constructions and non-finite forms. The term secondary agreement here refers to genitive agreement, dative-subject agreement and patient (and sometimes patient-agent) agreement. The breaking of default agreement rules has a range of pragmatic inferences. I argue that a distinction, based on formal, semantic and statistical grounds, should be made between conjunct verbs, derivational compound verbs and quasi-aspectual compound verbs. Rajbanshi has an open set of adjectives, and it additionally makes use of a restricted set of nouns which can function as adjectives. Various particles, and the emphatic and conjunctive clitics are also considered. The syntactic structures studied include: non-declarative speech acts, phrase-internal and clause-internal constituent order, negation, subordination, coordination and valence adjustment. I explain how the future, present and past tenses in Rajbanshi oral narratives do not seem to maintain a time reference, but rather to indicate a distinction between background and foreground information. I call this tense neutralisation .

Questions to Artificial Nature: A Philosophical Study of Interdisciplinary Models and their Functions in Scientific Practice

This thesis presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how models and simulations function in the production of scientific knowledge. The work is informed by three scholarly traditions: studies on models and simulations in philosophy of science, so-called micro-sociological laboratory studies within science and technology studies, and cultural-historical activity theory. Methodologically, I adopt a naturalist epistemology and combine philosophical analysis with a qualitative, empirical case study of infectious-disease modelling. This study has a dual perspective throughout the analysis: it specifies the modelling practices and examines the models as objects of research. The research questions addressed in this study are: 1) How are models constructed and what functions do they have in the production of scientific knowledge? 2) What is interdisciplinarity in model construction? 3) How do models become a general research tool and why is this process problematic? The core argument is that the mediating models as investigative instruments (cf. Morgan and Morrison 1999) take questions as a starting point, and hence their construction is intentionally guided. This argument applies the interrogative model of inquiry (e.g., Sintonen 2005; Hintikka 1981), which conceives of all knowledge acquisition as process of seeking answers to questions. The first question addresses simulation models as Artificial Nature, which is manipulated in order to answer questions that initiated the model building. This account develops further the "epistemology of simulation" (cf. Winsberg 2003) by showing the interrelatedness of researchers and their objects in the process of modelling. The second question clarifies why interdisciplinary research collaboration is demanding and difficult to maintain. The nature of the impediments to disciplinary interaction are examined by introducing the idea of object-oriented interdisciplinarity, which provides an analytical framework to study the changes in the degree of interdisciplinarity, the tools and research practices developed to support the collaboration, and the mode of collaboration in relation to the historically mutable object of research. As my interest is in the models as interdisciplinary objects, the third research problem seeks to answer my question of how we might characterise these objects, what is typical for them, and what kind of changes happen in the process of modelling. Here I examine the tension between specified, question-oriented models and more general models, and suggest that the specified models form a group of their own. I call these Tailor-made models, in opposition to the process of building a simulation platform that aims at generalisability and utility for health-policy. This tension also underlines the challenge of applying research results (or methods and tools) to discuss and solve problems in decision-making processes.

Toiminta ja tarkoite : Tutkimus suomen pronominista

The study describes the use and meaning of the Finnish demonstrative pronouns, focus being on the pronoun "tämä" (roughly 'this'). The Finnish demonstrative system is a three way one, the other two demonstratives are "tuo" ('that') and "se" ('it'). The data consisted of 12 half hours of video- and tape-recorded face-to-face and telephone conversations. The method for the study was ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA); in addition to CA, the theoretical framework consisted of functional linguistics and linguistic anthropology. First, the study dealt with the syntactic distribution of the three demonstratives. The pronouns were analysed according to whether they are before or after the verb, and whether they compose an NP on their own or are determinants of a lexical NP. The study suggested that the form and the placement of the NP presents the referent as continuous/discontinuous or given/new. Givenness of a referent was defined as "identified adequately for the purposes of the on-going action". The so-called dislocated utterances were considered separately. It was found that left-dislocations are used for inserting referents in a particular relation to the on-going activity. Right-dislocations offer a solution for the sometimes competing motivations of newness and continuity: they are used for securing the identifiability of a referent that is implied to be continuous. Second, the study focussed on analysing the meaning of the pronouns according to three dimensions of reference: referential, indexical and relational. It was found that the demonstratives can organize interactional or spatial context. When organizing interactional context, the demonstrative pronouns express the role of identifying the referent in relation to the on-going activity. The pronoun "tämä" expresses that the referent is referentially open and the characterization of the referent is given in the on-going turn. Furthermore, it expresses asymmetry of the indexical ground: it expresses that the participants of a conversation do not share a mutual understanding of the activity at that particular time. In addition, the referent of the pronoun "tämä" is central for understanding the on-going action. Centrality could be understood as the relational feature of the pronoun. However, it is a consequence of the referential and indexical features of "tämä". The pronoun "tuo" also expresses referential openness, but it implies indexical symmetry. The pronoun "se" implies that the referent is known enough, and implies indexical symmetry. When used spatially, the pronouns may refer to a physical space or to a situation. They express or imply that the speaker is inside or outside the referent. The pronoun "tämä" implies inclusion, and the pronoun "tuo" expresses exclusion.

Genus i östra Nyland : från dialektutjämning till dialektmarkör

Gender in eastern Nyland – from dialect levelling to identity marking The study of dialect leveling in eastern Nyland focuses on variation and change in the Swedish dialects of Nyland (Fi. Uusimaa) on the south coast of Finland. During the last century the grammatical gender system of the dialects in the area has been reduced from a three-gender system to a two-gender system (cf. Corbett 1991). The present study is based on five linguistic variables in the gender system: the anaphoric pronouns (han, hon, den) when used for inanimates; the neuter pronouns he(t) and de(t) – when used anaphorically or as expletives; and three different types of morphological postposed definite articles. For all these variables, both dialect variants and standard variants are used in the dialects. Within the study of processes of variation and change, the work focuses on the mechanisms of leveling, simplification and reallocation; cf. Trudgill (1986) and Hinskens, Auer Kerswill (2005). With regard to the reductions of the gender system, the possibility that some of these variables might have turned into becoming dialect markers (Labov 1972) in the modern varieties of eastern Nyland is given special attention. The primary data consist of tape recordings with 25 informants done in the 1960s and 1970s. The informants were born in 1881–1913. In addition, recent changes were investigated in detail in tape recordings from 2005–2008 with 15 informants, who were born in the period 1927–1947 or 1976–1988. The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods in the systematic analysis of the data. Theoretically and methodologically the study relies on methods and results from variation studies and socio-dialectology, as well as on methods and results from traditional dialectology; cf. Ahlbäck (1946) and the dictionary of Swedish dialects, Ordbok över Finlands svenska folkmål, (1976–). The results show that there are different strategies among the informants in their use of the features studied. In the modern varieties of the dialects, most of the informants use only two genders, uter and neuter. Of the variables, the masculine pronoun for inanimates, the traditional neuter pronoun he(t) and some variants of the traditional definite articles have received a new function as dialect markers in my data. These changes first affect the gender distinctions, and the function of marking gender is lost; gradually the features then get new functions as dialect markers through processes of dialect leveling and reallocation. These processes are connected to changes taking place in the communities in eastern Nyland because of urbanization. When the dialect speakers experience that the traditional values of both the dialects and the culture are threatened, they begin to mark their dialectal identity by using dialect markers in their speech.

Stor Anna, Liten Anna och tio andra personporträtt : Om innehållsliga och språkliga mönster i en mediegenres kvinnobeskrivningar

The aim of this licentiate thesis is to analyse how femininity is constructed in twelve portrait interviews of women in the dailies Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) and Hufvudstadsbladet (Helsinki) in September 1996, and to explore the portrait interview as a media genre. The qualitative analysis has a feminist and constructionist perspective and is connected to critical text analysis. It was carried out on two levels: first, femininity is identified on the linguistic level by choice of words, and second on the level of content (topical motifs/themes). The portrait interview as a genre constitutes a third dimension in the analysis: The aim is not towards the identification of femininity, but rather towards the identification of the portrait interview a relatively unexplored media genre. References (Swedish: omtal) to the principal character (or protagonist) are traced mainly through reference chains which consist of names, pronouns and substantive phrases. The interviewees were referred to by their full names in Dagens Nyheter (with the exception of the oldest and youngest interviewees, both of whom were mainly referred to by their first names), while the style of reference varied more in Hufvudstadsbladet. The position of the principal character was also analysed through her relation in the text to minor characters from her working life and from her private life. These minor characters maintained their subordinate positions in all of the portraits except that of the youngest principal character, in which the subsidiary voices became at least as strong as the voice of the principal character. Three frequently-recurring topical motifs occurred in the portraits: The first involved explanations for the principal character s success divided into three categories, agent, affect and ambition, the second concerned using journeys or trips as symbols for turning points in life, and the third referred to the ambiguity in the contradiction between private (family/other private life) and public (work) life. This ambiguity is connected to the portrait interview as a text type (genre) which features conclusions at the end of portraits, which in turn is characteristic of reportage. However, the analysis showed that the conclusions of the portrait interviews often also included elements of ambiguity. This was evident in the contradictions be14 tween private and public life that arose in the portrait interviews that focused on these two spheres. The portraits that focused on the principal character s public life showed ambiguity on a more general level concerning questions about being a woman and having a profession, and they often ended with a description of some details of her private life. The women in the portraits were all constructed as being successful, in terms of having achieved direct success, reflective success or success in the form of life wisdom. The women of direct success were described as ambitious individuals with no sidetracks on their life paths, while those of reflective success were described as active heroines who had received help from different agents, who could use their affects as enriching ingredients in life, but who in the end had control over their own lives (life stories). The elderly women were constructed as having achieved life wisdom and their portraits were focused upon the past. The portrait interview as a genre is characterised by journalistic freedom (in relation to the more strict news genre), by a now room (Swedish nurum ) where the journalist meets the principal character (usually via spoken dialogue that she or he transforms into written text to be read by a mass-media audience) and by the relatively closed structure of the portrait. The portrait is relatively independent in relation to the news genre and in relation to the context of what has previously been written, what is being written at the time and what will be written in the future the principal character does not need to belong to the newspaper s usual gallery of actors. Furthermore, the principal character is constructed as being independent in relation to the subsidiary characters and other media actors. The conflict is within the principal character herself and within her life story, unlike the news genre in which equal actors are in conflict with each other. The portrait is also independent in relation to the news lifespan; the publishing timetable is not as strict as in the news genre, but is still dependent on the factors initiating the portrait. The enclosures consist of a raw analysis of two of twelve portrait interviews and of copies of all portraits.

Att skapa en helhet av fragment Om översättningen av kohesiva element i Sjóns Stålnatt

Abstract (Creating a whole from fragments. On the translation of cohesive elements in Sjón's Steelnight): In this paper, I discuss the Swedish translation of the Icelandic writer Sjón’s debut novel Steelnight: a story (in Swedish Stålnatt – en berättelse). Steelnight is a fragmented novel which is located at the border between poetry and prose. At the beginning of the story, the writer introduces two main plots (with subplots). At first glance, it may seem as though the plots do not share much in common. However, a closer analysis of the text reveals that there are striking parallels between the plots which are created partly by the writer’s use of cohesive elements. Thus, despite the fragmented style, the writer creates cohesion in the text by using stylistic means such as repetition of certain nouns and adjectives and by a frequent use of personal and demonstrative pronouns. This use of cohesive elements creates a challenge for the translator.

Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anap- hora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year- olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing either a high or a low transitivity verb. Looking behaviour to pictures depicting the subject and object of this sentence was recorded as children listened to a subsequent sentence containing a pronoun. Children showed a stronger preference to look to the subject as opposed to the object antecedent in the low transitivity condition. In addition there were general preferences (1) to look to the subject in both conditions and (2) to look more at both potential antecedents in the high transitivity condition. This suggests that children, like adults, are affected by semantic factors, specifically semantic prominence, when interpreting anaphoric pronouns.

Texts "Con and Pro" : The Early Modern Medical Controversy over Tobacco

The habit of "drinking smoke" , meaning tobacco smoking, caused a true controversy in early modern England. The new substance was used both for its alleged therapeutic properties as well as its narcotic effects. The dispute over tobacco continues the line of written controversies which were an important means of communication in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The tobacco controversy is special among medical controversies because the recreational use of tobacco soon spread and outweighed its medicinal use, ultimately causing a social and cultural crisis in England. This study examines how language is used in polemic discourse and argumentation. The material consists of medical texts arguing for and against tobacco in early modern England. The texts were compiled into an electronic corpus of tobacco texts (1577 1670) representing different genres and styles of writing. With the help of the corpus, the tobacco controversy is described and analyzed in the context of early modern medicine. A variety of methods suitable for the study of conflict discourse were used to assess internal and external text variation. The linguistic features examined include personal pronouns, intertextuality, structural components, and statistically derived keywords. A common thread in the work is persuasive language use manifested, for example, in the form of emotive adjectives and the generic use of pronouns; the latter is especially pronounced in the dichotomy between us and them. Controversies have not been studied in this manner before but the methods applied have supplemented each other and proven their suitability in the study of conflictive discourse. These methods can also be applied to present-day materials.

Puheen suuntia luokkahuoneessa : Oppilaat osallistujina yläkoulun suomi toisena kielenä -tunnilla

This study describes how students influence their possibilities of participating in whole-class conversation. The main objective is to investigate the verbal and non-verbal resources used by students to modify the participant roles of the ongoing conversation. The resources studied are attention-getting devices such as hand-raising and address terms, recycling and other forms of collaborative talk, means of reference to persons, such as pronouns, as well as gaze and other embodied resources. The theoretical and methodological framework adopted in this study is that of conversation analysis. The data consist of ten videotaped lessons of Finnish as a second language in three secondary schools (grades 7 9) in southern Finland; the number of students per group varies from five to ten. Finnish has a triple role in the data as the medium of teaching, the target language, and the lingua franca used by the participants. The findings show that the multi-party context of the classroom conversation is both a disadvantage and an affordance for student participation. The students possess multiple tools to overcome and deal with the encumbrances posed by the large number of participants. They combine various techniques in order to actively compete for public turns, and they monitor the ongoing conversation carefully to adjust their participation to the activities of other participants. Sometimes the whole-class conversation splits into two separate conversations, but participants usually orient to the overlapping nature of the talk and tend to bring the conversations together rapidly. On the other hand, students skilfully make use of other participants and their talk to increase and diversify their own possibilities to participate. For example, they recycle elements of each other s turns or refer to the currently speaking student in order to gain access to the conversation. Students interact with each other even during the public whole-class conversation. Students orient to one another often even when talking to the teacher, but they also address talk directly to one another, as part of the public conversation. In this way students increase each other s possibilities of participation. The interaction is constantly multi-layered: in addition to the pedagogic agenda, the students orient to social goals, for example, by teasing each other and putting on humorous performances for their peer audience. The student student participation arises spontaneously from a genuine need to communicate and thus represents authentic language use: by talking to each other, often playfully, the students appropriate Finnish vocabulary, grammar, and expressions. In this way the structure of the interaction reflects the particular nature of Finnish as a second language lessons: all talk serves the pedagogic goal of enabling students to communicate in the target language.

Keep an "eye" on the text: The Use of Self-mention in the Academic Writing of Experts

One of the most controversial inquiries in academic writing is whether it is admissible to use first person pronouns in a scientific paper or not. Many professors discourage their students from using them, rather favoring a more passive tone, and thus causing novices to avoid inserting themselves into their texts in an expert-like manner. Abundant research, however, has recently attested that negotiation of identity is plausible in academic prose, and there is no need for a paper to be void of an authorial identity. Because in the course of the English Studies Degree we have received opposing prompts in the use of I, the aim of this dissertation is to throw some light upon this vexed issue. To this end, I compiled a corpus of 16 Research Articles (RAs) that comprises two sub-corpora, one featuring Linguistics RAs and the other one Literature RAs, and each, in turn, consists of articles written by American and British authors. I then searched for real occurrences of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our and ours, and studied their frequency, rhetorical functions and distribution along each paper. The results obtained certainly show that academic writing is no longer the faceless prose that it used to be, for I is highly used in both disciplines and varieties of English. Concerning functions, the most typically used roles were the use of I to take credit for the writer’s research process, and also those involving plural forms. With respect to the spatial disposition, all sections welcomed first person pronouns, but the Method and the Results/Discussion sections seem to stimulate their appearance. On the basis of these findings, I suggest that an L2 writing pedagogy that is mindful not only of the language proficiency, but also of the students’ own identity may have a beneficial effect on the composition of their texts.

Processamento mental da concordância verbal em estruturas do português brasileiro: investigação de possível interferência em sentenças com elemento movido sintaticamente

Muitos trabalhos têm buscado compreender como se dá o processamento da concordância entre sujeito e verbo e investigar fatores que possam influenciar a produção correta da concordância, gerando os chamados erros de concordância verbal. Franck et al (2010) realizaram pesquisa na língua francesa e encontraram interferência devido a elemento movido sintaticamente na produção da concordância verbal. Se faz necessário investigar se o fenômeno envolvendo movimento é o mesmo em sentenças do português brasileiro. Sendo assim, nosso objetivo foi investigar uma possível interferência de cópia de número plural entre sujeito e verbo (em relação de concordância) de elemento movido sintaticamente em construção de árvore sintática do PB, observando a origem do erro e tentando mostrar se há autonomia do formulador sintático. Ao propormos o diálogo entre Teoria Linguística e Psicolinguística utilizando o Programa Minimalista, versão mais atual do Gerativismo de Chomsky, a fim de observar a derivação sintática e o processamento das sentenças, acreditamos que o estudo de formulação sintática e um olhar por meio de um modelo de processamento, que abarquem tanto a formulação como a produção, esclareceriam a nós pontos importantes sobre o funcionamento da concordância verbal. A nossa hipótese é a de que um erro de concordância verbal não ocorra devido ao formulador sintático em estruturas de PB, buscaremos respostas para isso no modelo MIMC (Modelo Integrado Misto da Computação On-Line) (Corrêa & Augusto, 2007). No entanto, por outro lado, se um erro de concordância ocorre, tentaremos encontrar uma outra explicação que não proveniente da sintaxe, tal como, por exemplo, devido a aspecto de ordem morfofonológica e devido a tamanho da sentença, como colocado pelo modelo PMP (Modelo de Processamento Monitorado por parser (Rodrigues, 2006). À medida que realizamos dois experimentos com sentenças declarativa e interrogativa com o movimento do elemento DP e QU, os resultados mostram que o tamanho da sentença e fatores morfofonológicos podem produzir interferência devido ao tipo de elemento movido. Os resultados cedem terreno para assumir um formulador sintático autônomo e abre caminho para próximas investigações sobre o processamento da concordância verbal e possíveis interferências durante a sua produção

A norma gramatical como objeto de análise e de ensino: reflexões contemporâneas

Normas linguísticas são os usos instituídos pelos falantes da língua. Há normas consagradas pela tradição literária, por exemplo, e há normas consagradas pela tradição das comunidades. Quando estas não são aceitas, pode se dar o conflito, motivado pela não aceitação da nova norma, ou da norma diferente, geralmente acompanhada de avaliações negativas. Tomando os pronomes pessoais ele/lhe acusativos, me inicial e se sujeito (usando outras categorias quando a situação for favorável) como referência, procura-se investigar os motivos que levam a tais conflitos. Usa-se um conjunto de pensamentos provenientes da sociolinguística, do funcionalismo, da linguística histórica, da tradição gramatical, que, juntos, dão sustentação à problemática, sem levantar corpus exaustivo para descrição e explicação de regras da língua, motivo por que essas teorias são aproveitadas, enfaticamente, apenas em suas bases teóricas gerais. Os exemplos são esparsamente colhidos em fontes diversas: livros, canções, textos literários, ensaios, mas principalmente em notícias veiculadas na internet. É o que basta para um exame crítico da questão abordada. Para tanto, foram cotejados os posicionamentos da normatividade (a língua ideal, homogênea) com os da normalidade (a língua em uso, heterogênea). No entrementes é que estão as causas dos conflitos: a ideia de que a escrita representa o modelo certo, a resistência às mudanças e variações, o imaginário social que decide o certo e o errado, a ideologia avessa à evolução da língua e os conselhos do tipo não use e evite vão desgastando a concepção de língua. Para posturas como essas, não são aceitos os usos estigmatizados, embora abundantemente usados nos veículos de comunicação sociais

O encapsulamento anafórico em redações de vestibular da UEMA

Tomando como base redações produzidas por candidatos que participaram do processo seletivo realizado em 2012 para o preenchimento a vagas de diferentes cursos de graduação oferecidos na Universidade Estadual do Maranhão - UEMA, corpus desta pesquisa, tem-se o objetivo de analisar as ocorrências das retomadas de porções textuais produzidas por pronomes demonstrativos e expressões nominais definidas, constituídas por esses pronomes, denominadas encapsulamentos anafóricos, que contribuem para a progressão referencial dos textos. A abordagem proposta fundamenta-se nos estudos de Referenciação, postulados por Koch (2002, 2006,2009, 2010, 2011), Marcuschi (1998, 2008), Cavalcante (2003, 2011, 2012) e Tedesco (2002). Foram levantadas categorias de análise para a observação do fenômeno em estudo, sob três perspectivas: as formas morfossemânticas que podem assumir as expressões de retomadas no texto; as funções semântico-discursivas exercidas por essas expressões e a localização das expressões de retomada na estrutura textual das redações. O corpus desta pesquisa 45 (quarenta e cinco) redações de vestibular UEMA/2012, que corresponde a 10% da amostra de 450 (quatrocentos e cinquenta) redações analisadas constitui-se em textos dissertativo-argumentativos, o que propiciou a discussão teórica dos conceitos de gêneros discursivos e tipos textuais, no que tange à natureza estrutural dos textos analisados, fundamentando-se em Marcuschi (2008), Koch (2002, 2011), Rojo (2012). O estudo nos leva a afirmar que o pronome demonstrativo e as denominadas expressões nominais definidas constituem-se em um recurso discursivo bastante utilizado nas referidas produções de texto, promovendo não só a ligação entre as diferentes partes do texto, mas também contribuindo para a progressão textual por meio da referenciação