A discoursive-functional study of relative clauses in Portuguese: reflections on teaching

Abstract

This work problematizes the traditional, mechanical, decontextualized and classificatory teaching of relative clauses at school and intends to rethink the relativization from the actual use of language.  In this sense, grammar is studied here in verbal interactions as a means of speakers achieve their communicative purposes. Starting from a reflection on formal and functionalist linguistic studies, which may lead to the proposal of a new teaching practice of relative clauses, allowing students to (i) reflect on the pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological characteristics underlying the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, (ii) recognize other possible strategies of nonstandard relativization (resumption and prepositional phrase-chopping) as authentic structures of language, understanding the importance of the adequacy of the student’s speech to the formality level of the communicative situation. For this end, a qualitative analysis is made using data extracted from the corpus "Português Falado", which is representative of all official varieties of Portuguese. However, there is no intention of comparing them.