ANÁLISE SEMÂNTICA E PORTUGUÊS COMO LÍNGUA ADICIONAL: o fenômeno da ambiguidade nas provas do Celpe-Bras

Abstract

Loaded with identity and culture, languages are living organisms that undergo constant transformation as they continue to be transmitted. When we think about Semantics as a tool for teaching Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL), we encounter two large and extremely relevant areas of knowledge. Thus, this research aimed to contribute to the study of PAL teaching from the perspective of Semantics, which impacts teaching methodology and evaluation. To do this, we investigated whether Celpe-Bras, an exam for obtaining the Certificate of Proficiency in Portuguese as a Foreign Language, encourages Portuguese language learners to use the lexical-cultural knowledge of the language to solve the exam questions, going beyond the boundaries of the sentence and bearing in mind the communicational context. Considering that phenomena such as ambiguity, polysemy, synonymy, etc., are present in the language and that the texts constituting the exam are taken from real contexts that evoke communicative situations of language use, it is inferred, therefore, that the sense effects resulting from the use of these semantic phenomena act in the reading/interpretation and even in the text production in the exam. For this research, we used the editions of Celpe-Bras from 2019 to 2023, as we believe that this selection provides a clear projection for the upcoming years and is also the most recent selection. From these editions, we analyzed tasks 1 and 2 of the exam because they contain video and audio inputs that allow greater proximity of the enunciator with the interlocutor. For each input, we selected speech excerpts loaded with semantic effects that require the candidate's broad understanding so that they can respond satisfactorily to the task command. Drawing on the works of scholars such as Schlatter (2014), Scaramucci (2003), Ferreira (2022), Cançado (2008), and Ilari (2011), we concluded that while Celpe-Bras employs Semantics as a means to evaluate learners' proficiency, it is not imperative for candidates to identify the specific semantic effect utilized, as long as they mobilize, in the construction of their response, the explicit and implicit information present in the input. In summary, the pedagogical integration of such knowledge may enhance candidates' performance during the examination process.