Text distinctions in the Spoken Portuguese Grammar Project in Brazil

Abstract

The Spoken Portuguese Grammar Project (PGPF) was an initiative, led by Prof. Dr. Ataliba Teixeira de Castilho, which aimed to describe the cultivated spoken Portuguese in Brazil from its own perspective, based on data from the NURC/Brasil Project (Urban Cultivated Norm). This perspective recognizes the grammatical functioning of languages as a system composed of three subsystems (phonological, morphosyntactic, and textual). Within the scope of the PGPF, the Textual-Interactive Perspective (PTI) was born, an approach proposed to ground the description of the textual subsystem due to the nonexistence of an explanatory theory for the regularities of this subsystem. In the theoretical formulations of both PGPF and PTI, a movement of distinction regarding the term “text” takes place. Our objective in this article is to recover, historically and epistemologically, these distinctions. From a methodological standpoint, we conducted a bibliographic study based on the presentations/introductions of the works produced by the PGPF, on a study regarding the developmental trajectory of the PGPF, and on specific studies that ground the PTI. One of the distinctions associates text with the place where the regularities of language functioning are perceived; that is, text is a notion equivalent to the linguistic activity itself and corresponds to the instance of observation of linguistic phenomena. Another distinction is made to grant text the status of an object of analysis as a grammatical subsystem. Likewise, the third distinction is made to grant text the status of an object of analysis, but, in this case, as an overarching socio-communicative unit. Even if implicitly and non-systematically, these distinctions suggest the construction of different explanatory constructs based on the observation of the diversity of phenomena that comprise language, as well as an attempt to articulate the theoretical and thematic diversity in order to achieve the goal of building a minimally homogeneous theoretical framework. This characteristic of the PGPF therefore reveals its legacy for text studies, as well as the existence of developmental perspectives that point toward the resumption of these propositions as an enterprise for the field, particularly in Brazil.