Advérbios de posicionamento em textos escritos de português acadêmico

Abstract

The present study has as its aim to analyze, in an interdisciplinary approach, stance adverbs in Academic Brazilian Portuguese (PBA in Portuguese). This study is part of a bigger project from the Research Group Additional Language Use and Processing at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), which investigates the general patterns of uses of this specific type of language in order to create a proficiency test of PBA, since the number of international students has been increasing in Brazil. In addition, it seeks to stimulate more research in academic Portuguese and stance, to contribute to the development of academic Portuguese assessments for foreign students and to empower these students to write academic texts in PBA. To do so, with Corpus Linguistics tools and anchored in the studies of English adverbs by Biber, this research focuses on stance adverbs through the analyses of a subcorpus formed by specialized texts written by undergraduate students of approximately 2 million words compiled by the research group. This research aims to investigate whether these linguistic resources are used and, if so, to discuss the most frequent ones. The results suggest that the authors use stance adverbs, influencing the meaning of the utterances produced. The most common stance adverbs found are epistemic, confirming our hypothesis based on Biber s studies, which state that the most common stance adverbs in English are the epistemic ones