O ensino de verbos no ensino médio à luz do funcionalismo linguístico

Abstract

The objective of this work is to present some Functionalist contributions to the teaching of verbs in High School. It is understood that the emphasis in the examination of the flexional aspects of this class of words in the classroom tends to make mechanical the student’s analytical capacity, not only in relation to the examination of the verb category, but of the entire language, so as not to pay attention to the semantic and discursive-pragmatic aspects involved in the use of language. As a result, firstly, we tried to problematize the concept of the verb category based on some textbooks. Then, three important functionalist contributions were presented for the treatment of this class of words: 1) prototyping and grammaticalization in verbs, 2) the transitivity gradient, and 3) verbal clutches. As results, it was verified that some functionalist concepts, together with the proposal of Fiorin (1996), provide fundamental reflections not only to think productive and critical teaching of the verb category, but also to understand more general aspects related to the organization of the language itself.