Construction of textuality in the interlanguages of deaf learners of written Portuguese
text production, deaf, interlanguages, textuality, cohesion.
The present thesis is about the learning process of written Portuguese by deaf people speakers of Libras in an inclusive school scenario. The goal of this study is to assess the characterizing elements that construct textuality in texts written by these students. The data of a corpus made of texts written by four profoundly deaf participants, students of High School in Distrito Federal and speakers of Libras were assessed through a qualitative approach focused on the characterizing elements that make cohesion and coherence specific to the interlinguistic situation, in which two languages are involved: the Portuguese language and Libras. The interlanguages presented show the evolution of learners’ transitory grammars that, during the process, create interlinguistic rules. Based on bibliographical research about the structure of both Libras and Portuguese Language, the results of such research are presented under two perspectives: (1) identification and classification of the cohesive characteristics present on the texts made by the learners and (2) tracking of the interlinguistic process of each participant while acquiring cohesion elements of Portuguese language. Up to five levels of interlinguistic structures were identified: the text, the supertopic, the textual sequence, the coordinated or subordinated construction and, lastly, the sentence. Two interlinguistic syntactic rules related to nominal coreference of the sentences’ subject were inferred in the reference and coreference structure of the interlanguages. As for the learning process, four types of situations were assessed: (1) the transference of Libras, their first language, (2) the overlapping of linguistic resources of both languages, (3) new forms and (4) the knowledge acquired from Portuguese, their second language. The methodology applied was a longitudinal study over data registers collected within 11 meetings held every 20 days. Considering the text as the basis for the analysis, this research was grounded on the hypothesis of the existence of interlanguages according to Selinker (1972) and Gass and Selinker (2008), and on the functional fundament that the main goal of the language is to allow communication, according to Dik (1997). In order to assess the portuguese language, the hypothesis of Neves (1997); (2011) and (2019); Castilho (2016) and Koch (2009) were applied. Concerning the Libras language, the hypothesis of Brito (1995), Quadros and Karnopp (2004), Sabanai (2016), Araújo (2016) and Soares (2020) were applied.