Essa bolsa, é as minhas coisas do carro : reflexões acerca do tópico marcado em português

Abstract

Having functionalism as its theoretical support, especially Lambrecht‟s (1994) and Li and Thompson‟s (1976) proposals, this thesis presents a discussion into the rules for marked topic constructions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). All analyzed data came from authors whose constructions are herein discussed or from informal conversations. Based on several studies (Tarallo et al. (2002a, 2002b), Callou et al. (2002), Pontes (1987), Berlink, Duarte and Oliveira (2009), Perini (1996, 2006, 2008 and 2010), Brito, Duarte and Matos (2003), Li and Thompson (1976), we firstly looked into how different authors conceive of topic and how much disagreement there is among them, most of which as a result of their theoretical affiliation. On the second chapter of the work we stress topic as a linguistic category and bring to light a description of the pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic aspects involved in the codification of topics. The third and last chapter contains our assessment of topics in BP, in which we found a variety of structures that reflects communicative purposes. Ultimately, we drew the following conclusions: a) there are different nomenclatures and perspectives when dealing with topic construction in BP. Thus, the topic may appear in linguistic systems in a variety of ways, and the pragmatic context determines how such structures are codified; b) linguistic studies on topics have scrapped the notion of these structures being stylistic, although some restrictions do remain, such as the one that renders the topic to be a solely pragmatic and not syntactic category, or the one that states that topic constructions are agrammatical; c) we deem the idea of IE (Information Structure), as advanced by Lambrecht (1994), to be one of the most thorough approaches to the description of constructions with marked topic, for pragmatics, semantics, and syntax are equally considered; d) we acknowledge the fact that the current BP does codify subject-predicate and topic-comment structures; and e) we can undoubtedly attest to the high frequency of marked topic constructions within BP, and that these constructions are somehow in accordance with the properties of topic-prominent languages proposed by Li and Thompson (1976), which allows one to assert that Tp and Sp structures are just as basic in BP.