O discurso argumentativo em artigos de opinião produzidos por alunos finalistas da Olimpíada de Língua Portuguesa: uma análise à luz da Teoria dos Blocos Semânticos

Abstract

This work’s main objective is to examine how argumentative discourse is built in the genre opinion article produced by finalist students of the Portuguese Language Olympiad from 2014. It is, methodologically, an explanatory descriptive study, whose corpus was collected at the Portuguese Language Olympiad’s website and consists of thirty eight articles of opinion, from the five regions of Brazil, discussing the topic "The place where I live." For the analysis of this corpus quantitative and qualitative procedures were used, and also ducrotian theoretical assumptions of the Argumentation Theory of Language-TAL (1980), specifically its current phase, the Theory of Semantic Blocks (1995), developed by Marion Carel and Oswald Ducrot. Regarding the studies of genre, we follow the assumptions of Schneuwly and Dolz (2004). In our research, we proposed to: a) identify the marks of argumentative discourse in opinion articles from the 2014 Portuguese Language Olympiad; b) examine, from the statements and linguistically doxal lexicons, the normative and transgressive aspects of the theory of Semantic blocks and; c) analyze the sociocultural aspects. The analysis of opinion articles allowed us to conclude that the argumentative discourse marks identified in lexicons that represent them are directed to the semantically preparation of semantic blocks. It was found that most of the statements and lexicons linguistically doxal present in the opinion articles are made of normative aspects. Finally, when analyzing the social and cultural aspects, it was concluded that the speaker, while resident of the place about which he writes, takes on a socially situated role, as local citizen and as student, which helps him to report on the situation of the place where he lives, therefore, producing an argumentative discourse that can influence the way the speaker thinks, convincing him about the arguments used in the opinion articles.