The tense category in the acquisition of the portuguese written as L2 by deaf people

Abstract

The present study has as object the category Tense in the acquisition of written Brazilian Portuguese by deaf people. The analysis of the phenomenon of acquisition of the Tense category investigated here was based on the generative theory, assuming the innatist proposition of language acquisition. In the context of the acquisition of L2, we assumed the hypothesis of indirect access to Universal Grammar (UG). Our corpus consists of naturalistic samples - texts produced in a school environment. Results indicate the occurrence of specific temporal operators of Libras (Brazilian sign language) in the interlanguage - the past and future lexical items and certain adverbs. We observed the occurrence of lexical operator for past Tense marking in verbs with non-punctual Aspect and the dispensation of this mark in cases of verbs with perfective Aspect, as occurs in Libras according to a study by Silva (2015) and Silva and Lessa-de-Oliveira (2016). This finding characterizes indirect access to the UG in the process of acquisition of L2. The written productions also displayed temporal flexion according to the parameters of Brazilian Portuguese and the use of auxiliary verbs to mark the future tense.

Keywords

• aquisição da linguagem
• categoria tempo
• gramática gerativa