Estrutura retórica, combinação de orações, estruturas desgarradas: revisitando contribuições de Beatriz Decat para estudos funcionalistas

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the important contributions of Maria Beatriz Nascimento Decat to the investigation of what is traditionally labeled as “complex sentences”. In Brazil, Decat was the pioneer in the studies of discourse relational structure using Rhetorical Structure Theory. In the light of some of Decat’s main contributions, we analyze data from two different corpora, one of spoken language samples and the other of written language samples, in order to describe some of the structural and functional properties of discourse relations and clauses combining and of unattached structures, respectively. The data from the spoken language corpus reveal a high frequency of conjunctions such as quando (when) and low frequency of complex conjunctive terms. The data from the written language corpus reveal a high frequency of unattached constituents from simplex predication, and a low frequency of unattached complex clauses. These two studies show allow us not only to confirm some of the hypotheses raised by Decat, but also to extend and reframe some of her generalizations, particularly because of the use of quantitative methods.