Gramática e ficção: referenciação e predicação na construção de mundos ficcionais

Abstract

This monograph analyzes excerpts from three creative writing manuals (Prose, 2008; Brasil, 2019; Jaffe, 2023) published in Brazil, investigating how different grammatical topics addressed in these manuals relate to the construction of fictional worlds through literature. Based on Bonomi's (1994) reflections, the processes of reference and predication are taken as general categories through which a systematization of the grammatical topics identified in the manuals in a punctual and sparse way is proposed. This organization of the selected corpus made it possible to carry out six analyses, focusing on the following themes from grammatical and linguistic studies: i) categorization and recategorization; ii) deixis and anaphora; iii) selectional restrictions of adjectives; iv) selectional restrictions of verbal phrases; v) adverbial modification; vi) verbal and nominal transitivity; as well as a separate note on the relationship between metaphor and fiction. Following Neves (2011), the monograph relies on a functionalist basis to think about the dynamics between grammar and text in language in use (also taking into account the specificity of dealing with literary uses of language). The analyses from a grammatical/linguistic point of view were developed in dialogue with reflections on fictional worlds, dealing with aspects such as: the perspective-dependent character of worlds (Ronen, 1994); the fictional pact (Eco, 1994); the boundaries of fiction and the production of distance (Pavel, 1986); indeterminacy and incompleteness (Doležel, 1995); the rhetorical dimension of incompleteness (Ronen, 1994). By systematizing the grammatical knowledge identified in the manuals studied and relating it to a canonical bibliography on fictional worlds, the results of this work have the potential to contribute to both the field of creative writing and the field of grammatical studies.