A manifestação da evidencialidade nas dissertações acadêmicas do português brasileiro contemporâneo

Abstract

Evidentiality is a linguistic category used as a strategy to deal with information, considering the producer’s source of knowledge and his extent of (un)commitment to this source. In order to investigate the manifestation of this category in the construction of academic dissertations written in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, this work aims to: a) rediscuss the status of the evidentiality as a linguistic category; b) analyse the relationship between modality and evidentiality; c) verify the strategies used to indicate evdentiality in scientific works such as dissertations; d) identify, describe and analyse linguistic marks of evidentiality in such works; e) relate the use of evidentials to strategies of (un)commitment in the production of a text. Though the identification of evidentiality marks in academic texts, this work aims to contribute to explicit the sense effects related to the strategic transmition of information, since these marks are used with different purposes, like: use of the authority argument, reduction of responsibility in relation to what is being said; certainty/uncertainty modalization, suggesting that something is being said in a non-categorical way, suggesting a certain degree of (un)commitment in relation to the truth of the proposition, as well as showing a critical position in relation to the source of information, allowing a correct evaluation of the content taken in by the reader; among other purposes. The analysis, based on functionalist presuppositions, rediscusses the conceptual limits between modality and evidentiality. It investigates, in terms of both quality and quantity, the use of evidentiality marks in academic dissertations. This genre was chosen due to the supposition that it is one of the textual genres whose source of information is mostly not the author himself. This fact influences the use of evidentiality marks in relation to the degree of the producer’s (un)commitment to the information provided. The 290 ocurrencies were collected from a corpus which comprises 10 academic dissertations in Humanity Studies. Only the introduction and the conclusion sections of these Works were considered. The results showed that the sense effects are associated to the use of evidentiality expressions in the kind of argumentation process in dissertations. This proves that the evidentiality in the academic discourse, particularly in the corpus collected, is used especially to assure a lower degree of commitment, being the verb the linguistic means most chosen to express this, and the inferential and quotative evidentiality notions as the most frequent ones.