A frase preposicional com função de qualificador no grupo nominal: um estudo de equivalentes textuais no par linguístico inglês e português brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis draws on systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014) and presents a study of prepositional phrases (PPs) functioning as Qualifiers inside nominal groups. The aim is to describe these PPs in English and in Brazilian Portuguese related through translation in both directions (EO_PT and PO_ET). The study focused on textual equivalents retrieved from Fiction and Instructions Manual text types that compose Klapt!, an English/Brazilian-Portuguese bidirectional parallel and comparable corpus, compiled with texts from eight different types (Research Article, Political Speech, Popular Science, Fiction, Instructions Manual, Tourism Leaflet, Review, and Educational Website). In order to obtain these equivalents, the corpus was queried using a concordancing software (SCOTT, 2007) to extract concordance lines with search words chosen based on a list of prepositions (MARTIN; MATTHIESSEN; PAINTER, 2010). The lines were analyzed manually to identify occurrences of prepositions that were inside PPs functioning as Qualifiers. The concordance lines with the occurrences identified in the English and Brazilian Portuguese texts were aligned in order to extract the translation equivalents. The occurrences were annotated, firstly, according to categories related to the type of qualification realized by PPs, the type of Thing in the qualified nominal group and the type of Thing in the nominal group inside the PP. The PPs translation equivalents, in turn, were annotated according to the categories of formal correspondence and shift (CATFORD, 1965). Results revealed prototypical configurations for the PPs functioning as Qualifiers and the type of qualification they realize inside nominal groups both by language and by text type. These also led to the design of a multilingual system of QUALIFICATION in English and Brazilian-Portuguese. The results of the translated PPs functioning as Qualifiers, on the other hand, revealed that formal correspondence is most frequent in the EO_PT direction with 85,3% of the occurrences, while shifts were most frequent in the PO_ET direction with 64,5% of the occurrences. Frequencies of formal correspondence and shift also varied according to the text type. Class shifts not only were the most frequent in the PO_ET direction but also pointed to a pattern: Qualifiers in Brazilian-Portuguese being translated as Classifiers in English.