The uses of comma in students from last grade of Elementary School's texts

• Grant number: 08/04683-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2008
• End date: November 30, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Luciani Ester Tenani
• Grantee: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to describe and to analyze the uses of comma in written texts produced by 8th grade students from a public school of São José do Rio Preto city. The texts from which we collected the non-formal uses of comma belong to Banco de Dados de Produções Escritas do Ensino Fundamental (in development), related to the project Oficinas de Leitura Interpretação e Produção Textual, entailed to Pró-Reitoria de Extensão (PROEx) from UNESP. The punctuation study, generally, provides agitate discussions. Many normative grammars disagree in different subjects about the rules of uses from punctuation. The comma is specially the tick of punctuation which most generates problems when are compared the norms of its uses in different grammars. Considering this unstable place of punctuation rules, this project aims to understand how the students use the comma, producing a variation (between errors/rights) when using this graphic signal in their texts. We will analyze the erros and the rights of the uses of comma for showing that there is a variation which is not aleatory. Our hypothesis is that the student does some relations between the spoken language and the written language and this relation motivates the variation of the uses of comma, in addittion we consider also that there are, in this same dimension, several, and some times different, rules that prescribe the uses of comma in diefferent grammar books. In this research, we will consider the rules for the use of comma that are relevant for analysing the errors (considering also the cases in which there is disagreement among the grammar books that will be used as reference) for trying to understand how the relations between spoken and written language happen, justtifying, then, the erros of use of comma in texts written in scholar context.