Mecanismos prosódicos do vocativo e indicação de foco na escrita

Abstract

According to the literature the focalization is a reinforcement of some elements in the linguistic production where this focalized constituent represent a new information (HELDNER & STRANGERT, 2001; MORAES, 2006; MAKINO & MEDEIROS, 2001; KENNEDY, 1999; GONÇALVES, 1997). This paper is a begining of our contribution to te project “Letters to Santa Claus: the writing in Minas Gerais”. As Cunha & Cintra (2000), among the various focus mechanisms used by letter writers, what stands out the most, as expected in the letter genre, is the use of “an element used to attract the attention of the listener to identify him/her and to keep in touch. In other words, it is an element that serves to invoke or call, with more or less emphasis, a person or a personified thing “- the vocative - which features a large prosodic load, and can cause syntactic focus depending on its position in the clause. The numerical results of the uses of the vocative in the corpus demonstrate that prosodic mechanisms are used not only to characterize different types of vocatives, but also to show how such mechanisms are often used to focus on syntactic constituents, pragmatic indication and others linguistic informations.