Fictive interaction as exemplification in direct speech: teaching and learning of portuguese as a foreign language

Abstract

This article investigates instances of Fictive Interaction (FI) in direct speech as examples of arguments and explanations, in the context of teaching and learning Portuguese as a foreign language. Authors from Cognitive Linguistics are adopted: Talmy (2000), to deal with fictivity; Fillmore (1982), on the notion of frame; Langacker (2008), attentional frame; Fauconnier (1994, 1997), on projection of mental spaces; Sanders and Redeker (1996), perspective; Pascual (2002, 2006, 2014), FI as a way of organizing thought, grammar and discourse; Rocha (2020, 2022), fictive dimension of direct speech in relation to the factive one. As for the methodology, data from two classes in a higher-level class of Portuguese as a Foreign Language are analyzed. A methodological approach based on corpus (corpus-based) and guided by corpus (corpus-driven) is assumed (MCENERY; HARDIE, 2012; TOGNINI-BONELLI, 2001), allowing data to have greater protagonism, considering a category already established. The qualitative analysis reveals occurrences of Exemplification in Fictive Direct Speech aiming to promote in the speech conceptualizations of adverse condition, state of contemplation, state of disorientation, sudden recognition or insight and didactic explanation. The findings demonstrate that the phenomenon is productive in the classroom context, occurring in teacher and student speech with communicative purposes focused on argumentation and explanation. In addition, they reveal that the occurrences have a performative, linguistic and prosodically marked character, making the manifestation more vivid, as an invitation to the interlocutors to project themselves in space-time coordinates distinct from the current communicative scene, aiming at convincing and clarity in the teaching-learning process.