Abstract
Abstract: This paper presents the results of a study carried out to investigate the degree of perception of the thematic structure of the clause (theme and rheme) and the informational structure of a text (given and new elements) by Brazilian learners of English, undergraduate students from a Federal University in Brazil. The theoretical background relies on the principles of functional-cognitive linguistics, relative to how discourse impacts linguistic choices ( HALLIDAY 1985 CHAFE 1995 ). The corpus of this research consisted of a series of exercises that were administered to undergraduate students, English majors. The findings shed light to the fact that learners are still unaware of most processes involving grammar arrangements and the discourse flow, as they are not also very conscious of how grammar can impact the communicative intent of a written text.
Highlights
We checked how equipped students are to meet discourse communicative demands by making contextually adequate syntactic arrangements in clauses
We focused on the issue of how conscious learners are of the fact that there is an information structure, which involves the concepts of old and new information, as well as there is a thematic structure, encompassing the concepts of theme and rheme in texts
The corpus of the research consisted, in both phases, of a series of exercises administered to the undergraduate students in order to find out whether students recognized the principle of information distribution and were able to metalinguistically state it in terms of given and new elements in alternation in the discourse flow
Summary
This paper aims at presenting the results of a research carried out with the objective of investigating whether learners of English as a second language recognized, implicitly and/or explicitly, the existence of the functional/cognitive principle of information distribution in texts. The exercises administered to students aimed at checking the general perception of the necessity of moving some components of the clause in order to meet particular discourse demands, as well as investigating the degree of students' awareness of the fact that the same propositional content of a clause can be expressed through different nominal and verbal structures, for example, by having syntactic subjects performing different thematic roles. Another point of investigation was some aspects of the learners' interlanguage, according to Rutherford (1987). We will deal with the cognitive notion of attention, which is of particular interest for this study
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