Funcionalismo na ponta da língua : a questão da transitividade no livro didático

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how verbal transitivity is treated in Portuguese language textbooks used in Brazilian middle school, based on the assumptions of functional linguistics, especially the North American functionalist approach. It starts from the contrast between the traditional view, which considers transitivity as a categorical property of the verb, and the functionalist perspective, which understands it as a scalar phenomenon related to syntactic, semantic, and discourse factors. The theoretical framework draws on studies of traditional grammar, functionalism, and grammar teaching, highlighting contributions from Givón, Hopper and Thompson, as well as Brazilian scholars in the field. Methodologically, this is a qualitative, bibliographical, and documentary research with a descriptive-analytical orientation. The corpus consists of two 7th-grade Portuguese textbooks selected from the National Textbook Program (PNLD). The analysis examines definitions, examples, and teaching guidelines used to present verbal transitivity. Results show that although the textbooks are text-based and propose contextualized activities, they predominantly adopt a normative definition that treats transitivity as a verb’s syntactic requirement for complements, without exploring its scalar and discourse dimensions. The study concludes that the functionalist perspective can contribute to a more contextualized and reflective approach to grammar teaching.