A modalização em autobiografias do português brasileiro contemporâneo

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Maria de Fátima de Sousa
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Palavras-chave em Português: Modalização; Autobiografia; Gramática Sistêmico-Funcional
• Link de acesso: http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/66188

This study aims to analyze Modalization in autobiographies in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, considering the author's position in the construction of his experiences when narrating his life story. We take as Modalization, the linguistic resource related to the degrees of probability and usuality with which the speaker describes his experiences and beliefs. To carry out this study, we used the Systemic-Functional Grammar (GSF), by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004; 2014), as theoretical support. This grammar considers that the representations of the world and of the speaker's experiences are consequences of the lexicogrammatical choices they make in specific contexts of use and considers Modalization a phenomenon of content evaluation in terms of the axis of knowledge (probability) and frequency (usuality)). The corpus used in this research was composed of a clipping from six autobiographies. After identifying the Modalization resources in these samples, they were analyzed according to parameters that characterize Modalization in each context, such as their types, values, orientation, manifestation, interference of negative Polarity, textual typology, Processes Experiential targets of the phenomenon, the forms of expression and the tense of the verbal forms. We used the SPSS software (Statistical Package for Social Science, version for Windows) as a tool in the quantitative analysis for further qualitative analysis. 314 occurrences were found in the corpus. We conclude that the authors use, with a little more frequency, the construction of meaning effects on the axis of modal probability (57%); that they frequently use the high degrees (43.3%) of Modalization, focusing on the values of “certainty” and “high frequency” (44.2%), to present narratives of important facts from their experience; who are predominantly positioned in an implicit objective manner (64.4%), mainly through adverbial forms (58.9%). We also evidence that the authors use the Negative Polarity resource to shift the Modalization value from one pole to another (which may also attenuate and intensify the modal value); that Modalization primarily focuses on Material Processes (42%), indicative of doings and happenings told by the authors (also reflecting, ambiguously, on “behaviours” and/or “sayings”); that the Past Imperfect of the Indicative was significant in the temporality of the verbal expressions of Modalization, signaling the customs or the duration of the modal effects and that, in Narrative-type excerpts, the use of modalizers is more frequent (93%). We found, then, that Modalization is a relevant resource used in the autobiography genre, and is characterized, as we suppose, by anchoring the author's position in the narration of his experiences, in order to evaluate, in the field of certainty and commitment, contents about the formation of their subjectivity.