The role of syntactic and prosodic boundaries in comma placement in surveys

• Autor(a) principal: Vendramini, Isabela
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Tenani, Luciane
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: letrônica
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/letronica/article/view/42611
• topic: comma; phonology; syntax; Portuguese; Junior High School; vírgula; fonologia; sintaxe; Língua portuguesa; ensino fundamental II

This research discusses comma presence and absence in double schema in survey texts, written by students in the last year of Junior High School in a public school in the state of São Paulo. Commas in double schema are characterized by their occurrence on the right and left boundaries of a structure that is syntactically embedded or displaced in regard to the SVO order. The presence and absence of commas in syntactic boundaries were mapped and the prosodic boundaries were identified based on domain formation algorithms. Two questions guided the study: a) when there is a comma, which syntactic and prosodic boundaries can be identified?; b) when there is no comma, what syntactic and prosodic boundaries can be identified? We found that the (conventional) presence of commas tends to be favored by the coincidence between syntactic and intonational phrase (IP) boundaries, especially when the semantic-enunciative function of the comma is detected, and the (unconventional) absence of commas to be motivated by the non-coincidence between syntactic and prosodic boundaries. These results are similar to those described in studies which analyzed commas in texts of argumentative and report genres, but the percentage of conventional commas in the survey texts was lower than the ones from argumentative and report genres.