Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

VIOLETA QUENTAL, PONTÍFICA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO,BRAZILLÚCIA P. OLIVEIRA, PONTÍFICA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO,BRAZILMARIA CRISTINA G.G. MONTEIRO, PONTÍFICA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DEJANEIRO, BRAZILADRIANA N. NOBREGA, PONTÍFICA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO,BRAZILRUBIANE G. VALERIO, PONTÍFICA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO,BRAZILGRAMMATICAL METAPHOR IN THE WRITING OF SECONDARY STUDENTSThis paper presents the results of a research project entitled ‘Writing and socialinclusion: a corpus-based study on the grammatical metaphor in secondary studenttexts’, funded by a governmental agency (FAPERJ). In these texts, linguistic featuresthat characterize the grammatical metaphor, such as nominalizations, wereidentified to observe the transformation of verbal into nominal groups, which maybe considered as a specific difficulty in writing (Halliday,1994; Halliday eMatthiessen, 2006, Webster e Halliday, 2009, Simon-Vanderbergen et al, 2003). Theresearch investigates the use of the grammatical metaphor in a corpus ofapproximately 500 compositions, written in Brazilian Portuguese and collected inpublic and private schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Nominalizations wereidentified in the texts and analyzed qualitative and quantitatively, according tofrequency, their use in the thematic structure of the clauses and the distribution ofthe arguments (participants and circumstances) that accompany them. Besidesapplying systemic categories to describe the grammatical metaphor, this study alsodiscusses issues related to learners corpus collection and analysis withcomputational tools. Results indicate a higher frequency of the grammaticalmetaphor in private school student texts, which is in accordance with their masteryof writing conventions.PAPER SESSION 1A, ROOM 1 - MONDAY 25 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 196 Lisbon, July 2011