Academic Writing: Towards the Establishment of a Basic Textual Grammar

• Grant number: 18/12106-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2019
• End date: April 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Esmeralda Vailati Negrão
• Grantee: Paula Martins de Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This postdoctoral proposal is part of the transdisciplinary project Practices of Academic Reading and Writing (PLEA, from its acronym in Portuguese), which aims at improving academic reading and writing skills in the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo. From an explicitly applied approach in the begining, PLEA is expanding its goals and further systematizing its theoretical problems. Within this framework, this proposal aims at analyzing academic texts of undergraduate students. The interdisciplinary methodology involves the manual analysis of both the phrase level (based on the Generative Theory) and of the transphrasal level (based on the Tensive Model), and automatic analysis using Corpus Linguistics. The analysis will produce a basic textual grammar which will be composed of writing issues that are often challenging for students. This grammar will describe linguistic features of those issues, bringing up the writing choices usually tributed to social, historical, cultural, or pragmatic knowledge of the students.