A manifestação da modalidade pelo autor de livro didático em orientações para o ensino de gramática da língua inglesa

Abstract

Modality is linguistic category that reflects the speaker's subjectivity and the Teacher's Manual is a discursive genre that meets a demand for communication between author and teacher. In the context of research involving these two objects of study, we present this dissertation, which aims to describe and analyze the modalizers as well as the modal meanings present in the discourse of authors of English Language Textbooks for High School, with regard to guidelines for the teaching of grammar in that language. Based on the postulates of Discursive-Functional Grammar (HENVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) - a functionalist theory with a typological basis, which distinguishes the Grammatical Component interacting with three others: Conceptual, Contextual and Output – which analytical model takes into account the intention of the speaker and, and through a qualitative and quantitative methodology, using the SPSS Student Version software, we analyzed the corpus composed of 2662 clauses, selected from the 13 collections of Manuals distributed to Brazilian public schools, through the National Textbook Program. Based on the hypothesis that the modal attitudes established in the statements made by the author are impregnated with several semantic distinctions, the analysis showed that, considering the Interpersonal Level of the GDF, the author uses three types of basic illocutions - Imperative (52.9%), Declarative (46.7%) and Interrogative (0.4%) - through which several illocutionary acts are established - Order (53.3%), Possibility (10%), Explanation/Definition (25.9%), Question ( 0.5%), Permission (0.9%), Obligation (4.7%), Prohibition (0.2%), Denial (0.6%), Suggestion/Recommendation (3%) and Desire/Expectation ( 0.9%) - and uses Mitigation Operators (5.2%) and Assertion (2.7%) in their statements; as for the Representational Level, considering the GDF criteria, the Target of the modal evaluation falls on the Participant (82.8%), the Event (16.7%) and the Proposition (0.6%) and, by the Domain criterion semantic, the modalities identified in the corpus are: Deontic (88.3%), Epistemic (10.2%), Volitive (1.1%), Optional (0.3%) and Evidential (0.1%). Regarding the Morphosyntactic level, we observed that the modalities are expressed by Verbal Modes (Imperative and Indicative, respectively, 69.6% and 0.7%), Adverb (0.4%), Modal Auxiliary (24%), Periphrase (0.2%), Adjective (3.7%), Full Verb (1.3%) and Preposition (0.1%). In the specific analysis of deonticity we observe the establishment of obligations (94%), permissions (5.7%) and obligations (0.3%) to teachers and students, which are the deontic targets of the author. According to the results, our working hypothesis, that is the author of the textbook expresses several communicative intentions towards the teacher, is partially confirmed, given that the high level of obligations to the teacher remains.