Prosodic analysis of unconventional usage of commas in simple scheme in essays written by students for the college entrance examination of UEPG

Abstract

This paper analyzes unconventional uses of commas in a simple scheme in essays written by students for the college entrance examination of State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG) in 2022. We adopt the Heterogeneous Mode of Writing Constitution (Corrêa, 2004) as the theoretical framework guiding our conception of writing, considering that linguistic phenomena (speaking/writing) are expressed by language subjects through social practices (orality/literacy). Furthermore, another theoretical background that is the basis of this research is Prosodic Phonology, which, according to Nespor and Vogel (1986), presents the hierarchical organization of prosodic elements, classified as: syllable, foot, phonological word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and phonological utterance. Considering this, the higher-ranked constituents (phonological phrase, intonational phrase, and phonological utterance) are the ones mobilized in our analyses, based on previous studies on comma usage, namely: Araújo-Chiuchi (2012); Soncin (2014); Soncin and Tenani (2015); Soncin and Rodrigues (2018); and Francisco (2024). This research corpus is composed of texts provided by Selection Process Coordination (CPS) of UEPG, which were chosen following the criteria: 50 essays scored zero and 50 essays with a score below average. The excerpts which commas were unconventionally used in a simple scheme were analysed. As a result, with our text samples of college entrance examination essays, we corroborate the results from previous studies (Soncin, 2014; Francisco, 2024) that highlight the intonational phrase as the constituent that predominantly motivates the use of commas, although there are other domains involved in this process, such as the phonological phrase and the phonological utterance (Araújo-Chiuchi, 2012). Therefore, we conceive the comma as more than a mere graphic symbol, as it establishes syntactic and semantic relationships that operate at the prosodic level.