STUDY OF SEMANTIC AND ENUNCIATIVE STABILIZATION PROCESSES OF -ZINHO: SOME APPROXIMATIONS BETWEEN PORTUGUESE AND SPANISH LANGUAGES
Predicative and enunciative operations; language teaching-learning; diminutive; epilinguistic activities; enunciative approach.
The research presented here is part of the Stricto Sensu Postgraduate Program in Linguistics at the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT) and is enrolled in the research line Study of Signification Processes, aiming to establish a link between linguistic analysis and language teaching-learning practices. The central objective is the study of the -zinho unit in the Portuguese language, with the purpose of observing the syntactic-semantic relationships that influence the different configurations of this unit. Initially, a compilation of some studies was carried out and it was found that traditional grammar (GT) presents this unit as a "diminutive". The methodological procedure in the study of the diminutive assumes a fixed/isolated sense, being suitable for the unit that is analyzed in isolation, disregarding the variations that are proper to it in each context of occurrence. Based on some postulates of the theoretical-methodological framework proposed by the Theory of Predicative and Enunciative Operations (TOPE) by Antoine Culioli (1990, 1999a, 1999b) and its followers, the methodology was based on the activity of reformulating statements through paraphrasing. The statements were collected on the virtual platform Brazilian Corpus. As a selection criterion, occurrences were sought in which -zinho was stabilized as a diminutive of a marker with aspectual value or as appreciative modality (negative/positive), with the aim of detecting how Brazilian Portuguese speakers realize this notion. Then, considerations were made about this unit. In this sense, it is understood that the nature of language is not a representation of reality, so it sought to describe how the meaning of a unit is constructed so that it can trigger in the other a representation; how the identity of a unit is extracted. Thus, it can be said that the basic meaning of the -zinho unit is not to represent diminutive size, as GT asserts, an aspect that directed the presentation of the reflection on the contributions of the enunciative approach in language teaching-learning. Finally, this work defends the idea that grammatical concepts can be better grasped through the proposition of learning situations that activate the epilinguistic knowledge of learners, on which a reflexive proposal for language teaching is based.