A metáfora e a formação de esquemas narrativos em textos escritos de língua portuguesa

Abstract

In this work an approach to metaphor, in the scope of human cognition, is developed, taking into account theoretical assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics within the ambit of mental representations, and having them applied to a description of textual articulation. In order to achieve this goal, the research started from the study of different approaches tometaphor done by both Linguistics and Philosophy over the centuries, to focus on a few late twentieth-century postulates. Metaphor is thus assumed to be a resource used to facilitate reasoning by means of which more complex concepts are elaborated in terms of more simple ones. Metaphor is also considered as a phenomenon present in all levels ofcommunication, not being restricted to specific areas and activities of human knowledge.Based especially on both Mental Spaces Theory, by Fauconnier (1994), and on Conceptual Blending Theory, by Fauconnier and Turner (1994), the research was developed with the use of a small-medium-size corpus composed of higher education entrance examination compositions, written in Portuguese, describing the role not limited to the construction of small sentences or chunks of texts that metaphor plays in textual articulation. With the aid of the electronic tool WordSmith Tools© it was possible to obtain a systematization of quantitative data in order to proceed to the qualitative research, from where the results inthis thesis were made available. It thus becomes clear that, underlying the textual structuring of the samples of our corpus, as well as in other textual types that were also submitted to analysis, there is a pattern of organization considered as typical of the narrative process that includes the identification of information relating to time, space andcharacters, considering the interrelationship between metaphorical and nonmetaphorical levels. Starting from this, a descriptive model was idealized by means of which we introduce the so-called CDN Cognitive Domain of Narrative, with the objective of elucidating this process and introducing thus a better understanding of how the humanmind works, concerning the use of metaphor in textual articulation.