De quem é essa voz? um estudo sobre as marcas de subjetividade em monografias de conclusão de curso

Abstract

This doctoral thesis consists of a semantic-argumentative description of the undergraduate final paper genre. The hypothesis behind this research is that subjectivity manifests itself in this genre through polyphonic phenomena, especially the phenomenon of speaker polyphony and ON-locuteur (generic speaker), besides modalization and impersonality strategies whose purposes are to hide the presence of the speaker or exempt him from the enunciative responsibility. The corpus of this research is composed of four undergraduate final papers of different courses: Electrical Engineering, Law, History and Economics. This study – of qualitative approach and descriptive and interpretative nature – has as reference the Theory of Argumentation in Language (TAL), developed by Ducrot and contributors (1977, 1987, 1988, 1994) to whom there are elements in language that mark the presence of argumentativeness. This study is also based on Espíndola's (2004) statement that our use of language is argumentative. In the context of the Theory of Argumentation in Language, this research is centered on the notions of polyphony and impersonality, fundamental to the understanding of the ON-locuteur phenomenon (generic speaker), investigated by Anscombre (2005, 2010, 2014). These phenomena are also treated according to Nascimento's perspective (2005, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015). The studies about modalization - ways of perceiving the speaker's point of view before the enunciation - are based on Lyons (1975), Palmer (2009), Koch (2002), Castilho and Castilho (2002), Neves (2009) and Silva (2012). Impersonality is conceived and described here according to what is proposed by García Negroni (2008 and 2009). The description of the proposed genre has the studies of Bahktin (2000) and Marcuschi (2008) as basis. In this sense, the objective of this research is to verify how subjectivity is processed in the chosen genre. Results have shown that this genre, although described by the normative manuals as having impersonal nature, is constituted by interlacing voices and marks of subjectivity, even with the use of strategies through which the speaker responsible for the discourse, most of the times tries to hide himself from the utterance by creating the image that discourse is autonomous and thus appears to present itself as spokesperson for science.