Alguns aspectos da distribuição textual dos tempos verbais no português escrito em Moçambique

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to describe and systematize some aspects of written Portuguese in Mozambique, studying the behaviour of verb tenses in the text. In order to carry out our research, we worked on the basis of Weinrich's (1973) theoretical framework, which postulates the division of verb tenses in the text into narrative and commentary or argumentative tenses. To this end, we chose the "letters from readers" of the seminar "Tempo" (published in Maputo) as the type of text to be analyzed. With the aim of forming a homogeneous "corpus", we selected our sample by observing two basic criteria, namely the level of education of the reader (primary school teacher) and the internal structure of the letter itself (with one narrative and one commentary or argumentative moment). With regard to the reader's mother tongue (see page 12), it is not possible to ascertain this precisely in conditions such as ours, where we only work with written material, without any chance of having access to the reader. However, all the texts in our corpus contain a number of features of Bantu languages. This allows us to conclude that the authors of the letters, if they are not native speakers of Mozambican languages, at least speak one of these voux languages, a Bantu language. Another aspect is the theme of the letters, which here is just a resource that allows us to present our "corpus" in an organized way. These inaccuracies may have had a negative impact on the results of our work. We believe, however, that it was insignificant, given that our aim is to study the materialized text and not the text itself. This research is based on the hypothesis that there is a strong correlation between the occurrence of verb tenses as indicators of the speaker's attitude of relaxation or tension towards their utterances and the narrative and argumentative moments. To express this correlation we used Pearson's coefficient at a 0.05 one-way significance level. The results of our study confirm our working hypothesis (see page 10) that the verb tenses in the text "reader's letter" are distributed according to whether the speaker's attitude towards his or her utterances is one of relaxation (narration) or tension (commentary or argumentation). (TRADUÇAO NOSSA)