Predicado Nominal em Posição Temática: Papéis Modalizadores.

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the modalization role of the nominal predicate in thematic position from the analysis of textual portions at phrasal level, taken from texts produced by candidates to Unioeste entrance examination, in 2004. The interest in promoting an analysis in this context reflects an attempt to contribute, yet minimally, with the teaching of Portuguese, considering that the writing activities at high school aim to prepare the students linguistic-discursive abilities for the text production at the entrance examination. During the route traced for the development of this work, we tried to demonstrate that the unity nominal predicate + subject represents a structure of asseverative content from which the text producer exposes value judgments. The thematic position is used as a parameter for the recognition, in the syntactic plan, of a specific type of semantic organization. The delimitation of a syntactic-semantic description conducted an evaluation that joins the thematic position and the modalization content activated by the nominal predicate. For this reason, Halliday´s (1985) theory, based on the thematic structure of the clause, and the studies on modalization made by authors like Parret (1988), Castilho and Castilho (1992), Neves (1996), among others, support the hypothesis that the nominal predicate, when placed before the subject, plays a modalization role. The analysis carried out resulted in the recognition of a relationship between the nominal predicate and the propositional content exposed inside the subject. In this sense, the classification proposed in this work, although limited, summarizes the interpretation derived from comparisons and contrasts of the relationship PN + subject .