A unidade informacional de tópico no português do Brasil

Abstract

This study analyzed the informational unit of topic according to the theoretical framework called Teoria della lingua in atto (CRESTI 2000). This study and the one conducted by Ulisses (2008) that focus on the informational unit of appendix constitute a test project that has guiding the implementation and conduction of a broader project which has been collecting data to constitute a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese, the CORAL-Brasil.These are the steps followed:1. The prosodic tagging of three spoken texts into utterances and tone units and in the linguistic annotation of each unit.2. The measurement and evaluation of the main spoken measures (number of turns, utterances, tone units by time; number of words by turns, simple utterances and compound utterances, among others)3. The measurement and evaluation of some conjunctions focusing on its pragmatic functions.4. The deep analysis of the informational units of topic (prosodic, functional and morph syntactical features)The results pointed out how the application of Teoria della lingua in atto into Brazilian Portuguese can make possible the understanding of important aspects of spoken language and allow an important comparison with the four other languages presented in the C-ORAL-ROM. During this comparison, we identified some specialcharacteristics of topic, especially related to its occurrence in Brazilian Portuguese which should be further investigated in future studies.