Reported speech in the light of Argumentative Semantics and Normative Grammar

Abstract

The normative and prescriptive character of Grammar, called Traditional, establishes a specific pattern in relation to the use of certain linguistic constructions, considering only the structural aspect of the language. Under this bias, Normative Grammar (NG) prescribes some factors corresponding to the use and identification of the forms of the reported speech, in their variations. The Argumentative Semantics (AS), in turn, proposes the description and analysis of the meanings of the statements, consequently of the discourse, from the observation of the voices that the speaker puts on the scene in his enunciation. On this, we were interested in observing how the NG (GN, in portuguese) and the studies of Polyphony, within the HS, approach and understand the reporte speech. In this way, we elaborated a study on the direct and indirect style discourse - specifically - punctuating the approach presented by the AS in parallel with the approach of the NG of the Portuguese Language. To do so, we used cuttings of occurrences of statements in the form of reported speech collected in the academic genre Surveys Projects (final course assignment), of two distinct undergraduate courses (corpus collected for our master’s research). As a methodology, we adopted the analysis of the descriptive-interpretative type, under the theoretical conceptions of Ducrot (1987, 1988); Nascimento (2009; 2015), from the perspective of Argumentative Semantics and Cunha (1979); Bechara (2006), in the Normative Grammar approach. It was observed that the AS presents a possibility of a more focused analysis on the functioning of the reported speech, in real statements, while the NG presents limitations of analysis, concerning the eminently syntactic character with which it treats the phenomenon researched.