A concordância nominal de gênero na escrita do português como L2 por surdos

Abstract

In this research, we present a study of the writing of BP (Brazilian Portuguese) as an L2 by Brazilian deaf people, users of Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). Our main objective was to analyze how the marking of nominal agreement of grammatical gender takes place in written productions, considering that BP and Libras present distinct mechanisms for noun gender agreement. Therefore, we investigated whether and how the morphosyntactic characteristics of Libras have influenced the writing of BP as an L2, and whether there is a pattern in the marking of nominal gender agreement in the analyzed data, given that they are languages with different modalities and syntactic properties. We had two guiding hypotheses for this study: (a) the marking of nominal agreement in written productions of BP by Brazilian deaf people who use Libras presents an instability, sometimes manifesting the pattern found in BP, sometimes deviating from this pattern and presenting an agreement that we called default (b) the composition of the noun and its thematic vowel are directly related to whether or not the agreement is marked, that is, deviations from the agreement tend to occur more frequently in nouns whose thematic vowel is not -a. For our data analysis, we used the generative theory in its Minimalist model (CHOMSKY, 1995 and following studies), in addition to research carried out by researchers such as Luchesi (2009; 2012) and Sedans and Silva (2012) who analyzed occurrences of nominal number agreement and gender in varieties of Portuguese spoken in African countries and Brazilian quilombola communities. The results show that BP written as an L2 by deaf people seems to be directly influenced by the Libras structure, which is a language that does not have to mark the gender of nouns in the NP. Moreover, this is a process that occurs to all acquirers/learners of a language that does not have mandatory gender marking and have to adapt to a language that does present mandatory gender marking.