4) A estrutura argumental preferida em narrativas orais e em narrativas escritas

Resumen

Inglês: The goal of this research is to examine the existence of a preferred argument structure (PAS) in oral and written narratives. PAS is a highly preferred pattern of use of the verb core arguments (intransitive subject -S, transitive subject -A and object - O), which is composed by grammatical (one lexical argument per clause and non-lexical A) and pragmatic (one new argument per clause and non-new A ) constraints. The theoretical support for the research is found in Du Bois’s research (1987) about the PAS in Sacapultec, and in Chafe’s research (1980, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1992, 1994) about information flow in discourse. After examining, on the corpus, the four constraints that constitute the PAS, one can notice that all of them are confirmed both in oral and written language. However, there are some differences in the distribution of the lexical noun phrases and of the new noun phrases among the oral and written narratives. Written language, which has a slower production process, allows one to process more information at a time. So, in the written narratives, there is a higher frequency of arguments with new information.