O emprego não convencional da vírgula em esquema simples em redações de vestibulandos da UEPG: análise prosódica

Abstract

This paper analyzes unconventional uses of commas in a simple scheme in essays written by students for the college entrance examination of State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG) in 2022. We adopt the Heterogeneous Mode of Writing Constitution (Corrêa, 2004) as the theoretical framework guiding our conception of writing, considering that linguistic phenomena (speaking/writing) are expressed by language subjects through social practices (orality/literacy). Furthermore, another theoretical background that is the basis of this research is prosodic phonology, which, according to Nespor and Vogel (1986), interacts with other grammar components, aside from phonology, for instance, morphology, syntax and semantics. The authors claim that the prosodic elements are hierarchically organized and present their own rules, and they are divided in: syllable, foot, phonological word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and phonological utterance. Considering this, the higher-ranked constituents (phonological phrase, intonational phrase, and phonological utterance) are the ones mobilized in our analyses, based on previous studies on comma usage, namely: Araújo-Chiuchi (2012); Soncin (2014); Soncin and Tenani (2015); Soncin and Rodrigues (2018); and Francisco (2024). Moreover, we examine the relationship between the unconventional uses of commas in a simple scheme and the prosodic elements of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Our initial hypothesis was that the prosody of BP could influence comma usage, once prosodic elements are part of speaking and writing, according to Soncin (2014). The knowledge that speakers bring when registering their texts in written form carries prosodic information, which may lead to their usage of commas, regardless of convention. This research corpus is composed of texts provided by Selection Process Coordination (CPS) of UEPG, which were chosen following the criteria: 50 essays scored zero and 50 essays with a score below average. The excerpts which commas were unconventionally used in a simple scheme were analysed, aiming to observe how unconventional punctuation occurred from the perspective of prosodic domains. This is an exploratory study focused on the qualitative analyses of the data obtained from the analyzed essays. As a result, with our text samples of college entrance examination essays, we corroborate the results from previous studies (Soncin, 2014; Francisco, 2024) that highlight the intonational phrase as the constituent that predominantly motivates the use of commas, although there are other domains involved in this process, such as the phonological phrase and the phonological utterance (Araújo-Chiuchi, 2012). Therefore, we conceive the comma as more than a mere graphic symbol, as it establishes syntactic and semantic relationships that operate at the prosodic level.