APRENDENDO A RELATIVA PADRÃO NA ESCOLA

Abstract

Recent works have shown that, as far as Brazilian Portuguese is concerned, homogeneity cannot be found in the spoken language. Among various grammatical items, we can choose the relative clause as an example of linguistic variation. There are vernacular relativization strategies for speakers that never attended school and a standard construction, with a preposition, learned through formal education. The results of a study using students data showed that elementary school students don't use the preposition in the relative clause in oral language and that they use it, in the written texts, only in the high school. Before this, the relative pronoun is always the same for all relativized functions and the preposition is completely absent. It was also shown that only after many years the speaker fully acquires the standard strategy, high school students, induced to use the standard variety, tended to reject it, either replacing it by other syntactic arrangements. They also produced hypercorrections and made mistakes, showing an imperfect learning of the strategy. The great difficulties in producing the standard relative and the fact that the students come do it practically only by the end of high school is due to differences in the syntactic position occupied by the element to be relativized: in the standard strategy, it moves from inside the clause, while, in the vernacular, it is outside the relative sentence, in such a position that the process proves to be more accessible to the speaker, leaving out the preposition. The difference between both structures is in the interface between strict syntax and discourse. The speaker profile has some implications of methodological order for the teaching of Brazilian Portuguese, to the extend that it reveals a reality in which linguistic ideal and standard norm do not match.