Uso da pontuação em textos narrativos de alunos do sétimo ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This research investigates the factors that motivate the use of punctuation in 7th grade students‘ compositions of Ensino Fundamental (elementary) of a public school in João Pessoa city. To observe in which criteria the students based for punctuate in their compositions, it were collected texts production and it was elaborated a questionnaire with some questions about the use of punctuation, especially the use of the final marks and the commas. For the evaluations, it were considered the precept of some traditional grammarians like Azeredo (2008), Bechara (2004), Cegalla (2008), among others and studies about punctuation use, linguists like Araújo-Chiuchi (2012), Lima (2003) and Pressanto (2007). Besides that, in this research, it was related the applying of the punctuation marks to the Functionalist Principle of Iconicity. In the Normative Grammar we observe that is assign to the punctuation, the pause delimited function, however, in linguists researches as in Dahlet (2006), we could verify that the punctuations marks must be explain from other aspects (syntactic and semantics). The analyzed texts productions showed that the students based in oral aspects to punctuate in their compositions. This criterion was observed through the use of typical resources of spoken modality, of the predominance of structures without the right punctuation and without cohesive elements in the texts production and the (not) use of comma in locations that, in grammatical tradition , should be used, due to the displacement of some sentence terms. The answer of the questionnaire also revealed that the prosodic criterion is used for the application of the punctuation marks in the text. In conclusion, this study pointed out that the use of punctuation marks in the composition of those students is influenced also by external factor of the language, like the level of text organization and the extension of the text.