Acessibilidade de referentes: um convite à reflexão

Abstract

The concept of reference has experienced a number of transformations through times, consistent with epistemological, linguistic and pragmatic changes (GHIRALDELLI, 2005). According to the more recent standpoints on language, that notion is now seen as a process which develops from the discourse pragmatics and which, because of that, involves aspects of the interaction-cognition. Such new viewpoint on the phenomenon requires new tools in order to account for its complexity. In this dissertation, we discuss six of the current models of the reference phenomena and we elected the Accessibility Theory, by Ariel (1996, 2001) as the most advanced, when it comes to link the pragmatic elements to the purely linguistic aspects. Although it is still based on the classical cognitivism, one of the paradigms criticized by theoreticians of the pragmatic-discursive view, that theory proposes a complex interaction among factors on the several levels of the text/discourse universe. Besides an extensive bibliographical research, a corpus of 223 messages exchanged between members of the Virtual Community for Language was arranged, from which we got examples that supported our theoretical considerations. Although no statistical treatment was applied to the corpus, we noted that an important phenomenon, present in the beginning of several messages, is the process of anaphoric encapsulating, almost always summarizing the propositional content of other message(s). We observed that the uncertainty of textual limits, which is present in such type of hybrid communication, seems to be responsible for demanding the summarization and found that the Accessibility Theory, that does not separate what is textual from what is extratextual, is an important tool to treat those questions, which, although present in any type of discourse, are so evident in the discussion list environment