Domínios discursivos: uma visão cognitiva da estruturação de narrativas orais

Abstract

A corpus composed of 13 oral narratives, in Brazilian Portuguese, has been analysed in terms of its TAM (Tense, Aspect and Mood) values and it has been checked that the verbal system serves the discourse purpose of marking which linguistic material belongs to the Narrative Figure, which belongs to the Narrative Ground, and which to the Direct Speech. It was shown, thus, that the structure of oral narratives mirrors the perceptual cognitive principle of the distribution of elements into foreground and background (Hopper 1979, based on Gestalt Psychology). This work aimed at joining the Mental Spaces (Fauconnier 1994, 1997) and Blending (Fauconnier & Turner 1996, 1998, 2002) theories, which belong to the Cognitive Semantics framework, to the Gestalt concepts for better description of the cognitive reality of oral story telling. For that purpose, it was proposed that Figure, Ground and Direct Speech could be seen as independent, interconnected discourse domains. Each of these domains has certain general characteristics in terms of the discourse notions (BASE, FOCUS, EVENT, POINT OF VIEW) and the tense-aspect categories (PRESENT, PAST, future, perfect, progressive, PERFECTIVE, IMPERFECTIVE) in Cutrer (1994). Extracts from the data were diagramed and it was shown the adequacy of describing the structure of oral narratives in terms of the Cognitive Semantics framework and its concept of mental spaces.