The present study investigates the use of conjunction-type connective in
argumentative and dissertation texts, to verify their quantitative and qualitative
aspects of occurrences and patterns of use related to textual structures. The problem
addressed here fits into the theoretical field of language studies in use, which
appeared in the mid-1960s, whose conceptual and methodological framework
continues to be very productive for textual studies (MODESTO, 2006), and its
application is welcome on language description and education works. The literature
review included the study of connective and conjunctional taxonomy, according to
Houaiss (2001), Villar (2001), Castilho (2017), Cunha (2017) and Savioli (2007); as
well as the point of view of Koch (2017) and others, who consider that the connective
connectors type have an important impact on the construction of meaning in the text.
The corpus of 10 randomly selected essays was token from the 1000 essay database
of the research project “Automatic evaluation of answers to non-objective questions
through intelligent methods”, UFPA, 2017-2018. These essays were sectioned
according to the organizational structure of the argumentative and dissertation text,
postulated by Fiorin (2018): introduction, development and conclusion. In each
section, once the occurrences of conjunctions were identified, the period of each
occurrence was isolated, in order to observe, in each case, aspects of the coherence
of the construction. With these periods and their conjunctions, for each section of the
10 essays, tables and graphs were constructed, which allowed a qualitative and
quantitative assessment of the findings. The Results indicated that conjunctions
occur more frequently in development, followed by conclusion and introduction;
occurrences of the forms “when”, “but”, “for”, “nevertheless”, “therefore”, “also” and
“or… or”; It was noteworthy that conclusive conjunctions (“therefore” and “thus”) were
presented in the introduction of 3 (three) of the analyzed texts and the development
of 2 (two) others. Finally, the isolated periods are generally considered to be following
local coherence conditions, and the global coherence in each text showed that
conclusive conjunctions present meanings as cause, justification, consequence and
retaking, portraying the multifunctionality.
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