Fractais semióticos em português brasileiro: um estudo sobre significados circunstanciais em textos da atividade sociossemiótica relatar

Abstract

This dissertation is a systemic-functional study (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014) that investigates circumstantial meanings as semiotic fractals (MATTHIESSEN, 1995; MATTHIESSEN; TERUYA; LAM, 2010; DREYFUS; BENNET, 2017) with a view to describing how these meanings are construed in Brazilian Portuguese. As such, it seeks to be comprehensive enough to provide generalizations about this type of meaning in Brazilian Portuguese, enabling later comparison between languages and contributing to systemic approaches to translation (FIGUEREDO, 2011). Previous studies on circumstantial meanings in Brazilian Portuguese have addressed only their prototypical construction by Circumstances (BRAGA, 2016), which corresponds to a portion of this type of meaning (DREYFUS; BENNET, 2017). An analysis based on the different constructions that circumstantial meanings have in the lexicogrammar aims at capturing those meanings more comprehensively, as they are amenable to being construed non-prototypically by participants, processes and clauses (DREYFUS; JONES 2011; DREYFUS; BENNET, 2017; MATTHIESSEN, 1995; HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014). To characterize the circumstantial meanings in Brazilian Portuguese, the present dissertation was divided into two stages of analysis. The first stage comprised a corpus of ten texts belonging to the sociosemiotic activity reporting (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014) extracted from news websites. These texts were inserted in the annotation software UAM CorpusTool® (O’DONNELL, 2008) and annotated in order to first capture their circumstantial meanings and then understand both the fractal aspect of these meanings in Brazilian Portuguese and their impact on the text as a whole through the analysis of a specific text (MARTIN; ROSE, 2007). The second stage of analysis involved a corpus built with the aid of a semantic annotator created in partnership by the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation (LETRA) of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the Laboratory for Advanced Information Systems (LAIS) of FUMEC University, both in Brazil. The annotator provided clauses extracted automatically from news websites in Brazilian Portuguese to be annotated by a group of people (i.e., crowdsource annotation). After the annotations were completed, a spreadsheet with the answers was extracted from the semantic annotator. These answers included clauses with circumstantial meanings that made up the corpus of analysis of this research. This corpus was inserted in a new spreadsheet and annotated according to the construction of each circumstantial meaning (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014). The results of the first stage of the analysis showed the fractal aspect of circumstantial meanings in Brazilian Portuguese through their construction by Circumstances, Participants, Qualifiers operating in the nominal group, processes, and clauses in a clause complex. Complementarily, the second stage provided the language speakers’ view of the fractal aspect of circumstantial meanings in Brazilian Portuguese. This fractal aspect was made explicit in this stage mainly through the meanings of spatial and temporal locations, which were the most frequent in the analysis. Studying circumstantial meanings from a broad perspective characterizes these meanings in a specific language, which allows for later comparison with other languages in studies of translation. From a pedagogical perspective, this study contributes to considering the fractal aspect of circumstantial meanings when studying transitivity – more specifically, such an aspect will bear upon the analysis of clauses and texts as Participants, Processes and Circumstances are different components of a figure, but all of them may construe circumstantial meanings.