O sujeito indeterminado sob a ótica da sociolinguística educacional : uma proposta de sequência didática

Abstract

This research, which is part of research line 1 Language and Interculturality Studies of the academic master's degree program in Language, Literature and Interculturality, discusses the teaching of grammar in the school context, more precisely, the status of the indeterminate subject in Portuguese classes. The theoretical foundation is based on Educational Sociolinguistics, especially Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Antunes (2007), Faraco (2015), traditionalist grammars: Bechara (2020), Hauy (2015), Cunha and Cintra (2013), Rocha Lima (2011), Bechara (2009) and Cegalla (2009), contemporary normative grammarians, such as Castilho (2020) and Azeredo (2021), as well as descriptivist grammarians, Bagno (2012), Neves (2011) and Perini (2010). The general objective is to problematize discussions about the indeterminate subject in secondary education, with a focus on learning, observing linguistic variation and the implications for teaching mother tongue in the classroom. To this end, we propose the development of a Didactic Sequence (DS) that promotes students' critical sense, in order to demonstrate which variants of subject indeterminacy exist in Brazilian Portuguese and how style (Labov, 1972) influences their use (Marcuschi, 2008). We also proposed a questionnaire, using Google Forms, to be answered by the mother tongue teacher of the selected class, in order to understand how he understands the phenomenon investigated in this research. To prepare the DS, occurrences of indeterminate subject were extracted from a corpus made up of seven different textual genres, ranging from those in which informal orality predominates to those characterized by formal writing. Based on this data, the Didactic Sequence was formulated and applied to a 3rd year high school class, in a public school in the city of Itapaci-GO, about 222 km from the capital Goiânia, with the aim of helping to identify cases of indeterminate subject that have not been recorded by some normative grammars, nor by textbooks, such as: subject expressed by generic referencing (you or they - unspecified); elliptical subject with the verb in the 3rd person plural; 3rd person plural (some specific verbs - steal, verbal communication, cognition); noun phrases such as a gente, muita gente, todo mundo, among others. After applying the Didactic Sequence, the participants' responses were investigated in order to identify their recognition of the forms of indeterminacy of the subject mentioned, and we found that 70% of the participants did not identify the subject when it was represented by an indefinite pronoun, 80% identified the pronoun they as a generic referent, among other non-canonical possibilities. Compared to the teacher's answers, it is possible to deduce the influence of answers closer to traditional concepts of normative grammar. In this way, we believe that critical knowledge of the variants of the indeterminate subject in BP will have a sociolinguistic and cultural impact on students' knowledge of the variable use of language and its contexts of use, contributing to the improvement of their communicative competence.