Marcas de pontuação em manuscritos escolares: estudo sobre os usos de vírgulas por alunos de uma turma do 9º ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This dissertation presents a case study that aims to analyze the use of commas in school manuscripts produced, in pairs, by students of the 9th grade of Elementary School in a public school in the city of Jequiá da Praia (Alagoas). We start from the assumption that the unconventional uses of the comma present in school manuscripts reveal important information about the instructions that these students received about this kind of punctuation in a school context. For this analysis, we sought to describe the uses of this punctuation and establish similarities and differences between them. Our interest is to explain the patterns and regularities with regard to the conventional and unconventional use of the comma in the statements present in the analyzed manuscripts. Based on the results obtained, most of the students in the analyzed class, despite not having a basic conventional knowledge about the comma, have an implicit knowledge about this punctuation. For this analysis, we identified and analyzed each occurrence of a comma present in written textual productions and related them to the normative instructions of the main Brazilian grammars. For this, we take as a basis the conventionality of the use of the comma present in the grammars of Bechara (2009), Cegala (1998), Cunha e Cintra (1985), Ferreira (2011), Lima (1992) e Paschoalin e Spadoto (1989). We also relied on the studies of linguists such as Araújo-Chiuchi (2012), Luft (2002), Silva (2016), Tenani (2021) e Rocha (1998), in order to address the use of the comma under different approaches (morphosyntactic, semantic and historical). We are also based on studies by Calil (2009), (2013) and Felipeto (2019), which explain important aspects about the school writing process and about the specificities and importance of collaborative writing. After analyzing the corpus of this research, we found that the non-conventional use of commas occurs, in almost all cases, in full stop position, that is, at the end of syntactically complete sentences. We also found that these uses were not random, that is, they followed a syntactic writing pattern: always in a position that should be the full stop. Thus, students seem to understand the limits of syntactic periods, but do not have normative knowledge about the punctuation that should be used at the end of them. We interpret these results as a failure in school teaching about the comma and the syntax of written language. We believe that the results of this research may not only reveal the importance of syntactic knowledge of comma use, but also contribute to the teaching practices of this punctuation in a school context.