Articulação hipotálica adverbial e argumentação: uma análise do uso das orações concessivas em artigos de opinião e editoriais

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the usage of concessive hypotatic clauses involved in the construction of argumentation. Based on functional theories, we analyzed the syntactic aspects, the textual-discursive aspects and the textual-semantic aspects that are associated to the usage of the concessive subordinate clause involved in the construction of argumentation in newspaper articles and editorials. We observed that the syntactic aspects of concessive subordinate clause are related to the pragmatic aspects. Thus the concessive subordinate clause position (before or after main clause or embedded clause) shows the way a speaker decides to organize her utterance due to communication purposes; hence it is connected to discursive functions. We observed that in newspaper articles and editorials, the concessive clause position before or after main clause is not relevant. Our investigation shows that few conjunctions tend to introduce concessive subordinate clause before main clause, for instance apesar de and por mais/menos que, whereas other concessive conjunctions tend to introduce subordinate clause after main clause, for example mesmo que. In the corpus, the conjunction embora is as frequent in concessive clauses before main clause as in concessive clauses after main clauses. As regards the textual-semantic aspects, we observed, besides the concessive inferences, other inferences such as condition and inclusion inferences. In an analysis based on the interpretation domains proposed by Sweetser (1999), we found, in newspaper articles and editorials, that the greater number of examples allows an interpretation in the epistemic domain, but there is a meaningful number of examples that lead to a possible interpretation in the content domain, probably this is due to the fact that newspapers genres are related to social happenings and facts. Regarding concessive clause types we observed, in the corpus analyzed, that the factual concessive clauses predominate. When we verified the textual-discursive aspects, we observed, that concessive subordinate clauses are used as main clause background and when they are placed after main clause they often represent an evaluation or an addendum to main clause, whereas concessive clause before main clause and embedded concessive clause work as a topic to a nuclear information or as a way to attain discursive cohesion. As regards the argumentative role of concessive clause in newspaper articles and editorials, we observed concessive subordinate clause represents an important strategy; through concessive clause, the author presupposes an objection on the part of the reader and he declares that the objection does not hinder the content expressed in the main clause.