Proverbial brands in college entrance essays

• Grant number: 11/16337-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: October 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Applied Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Manoel Luiz Gonçalves Corrêa
• Grantee: Glauce de Oliveira Alves
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research to investigate the mechanism of intergeneric connections, in employment of proverbial brand - different ways of presenting the proverb as a discourse genre - in college entrance essays, from a comparative study of the discursive functioning of these brands into two sets of texts, namely: sixty essays of vestibular FUVEST/2006 (theme Labor) and sixty essays of vestibular FUVEST/2009 (theme Borders), totaling 120 texts. In these essays, were recognized following record types proverb as a discourse genre, for me called proverbial brands: (a) building where the proverb appears entirely with the use of quotation marks and/or gloss, (b) construction in which the proverb appears in full without using quotation marks and gloss; (c) organized statement from the modification of the structure of a proverb; (d) utterance that alludes to the meaning of a proverb, and (e) construction that reproduces the structure of a proverbial utterance. Under a look enunciative-discursive, this work is based primarily on studies of the Bakhtin Circle, related to the dialogical perspective of language and the theory of speech genres, in Maingueneau (1997, 2008b, 2010) regarding his considerations on strategies for capture and subversion and on aspects of proverbial utterance and, in Lysardo-Dias (2004), who understands the proverb as a genre of discourse that is characterized by mandatory insertion into another genre. The results of this research reveal that the discursive functioning of proverbial brands results from the intergeneric connections. This mechanism turns out not only by the insertion of proverbial brands in writing entrance exam, where they play several argumentative functions, but also because these brands show traces of other genres in which the proverb has already been installed. In one case and in the other, these traces are recognizable both in thematic content, as in the compositional construction and the style of the genre. Contrary to the recommendation of school to avoid using expressions crystallized in college entrance essays, the results are presented as contributions to teaching as: (a) open the possibility of a reading of texts that allows to understand them as records of dynamicity of discourse genres; and (b) relativize that academic recommendation given that the text quality is not always linked to the absence of crystallized forms.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

ALVES, Glauce de Oliveira. Proverbial brands in college entrance essays. 2013. Master's Dissertation - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.