The use of commas and prosody of Brazilian Portuguese: analytical- theoretical aspects and didactic implications

Abstract

In this paper, we establish relations between the uses of comma in texts written by students from the year of Middle School and the prosodic organization of Brazilian Portuguese. Even though commas usage convention is primarily syntax-based, we argue that the uses of commas in texts have prosodic regularities that, simultaneously, organize the segmentation of utterances and contribute to the constitution of sense in texts. On the one hand, we argue that prosody is a signifying structure in writing and, thus, it is not a particularity of speech. On the other hand, we defend that the uses of commas, by establishing the prosodic structure of language in writing, do reference, by a symbolic process, the way prosodic phenomena produce sense in different utterances within oral practices. As a possible application of the theoretical discussion, we propose to recognize the complexity of commas usage as a more interesting practice at school than considering its so-called syntactic homogeneity.

Keywords

• Comma
• Prosody
• Writing
• Portuguese