Grammatical relation direct object: the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics

Abstract

The present article aims to investigate the discursive manifestations of the direct object grammatical relation, based on the syntactic-semantic and discursive-pragmatic levels that underlie the manifestation of this element. For this, the research is oriented by the theoretical framework of the functionalism, in its North American and Brazilian side. This theoretical current shares the view that language is a living and malleable organism, subject to the pressures coming from sociocultural contexts. Grammar, in turn, is the result of linguistic standards created, maintained and systematized in and for language use. The analysis prioritizes the semantic types of verb and its relation with the argument syntactically coded as direct object. Direct objects are classified as morphological coding (lexical Nominal Syntagma or pronominal Nominal Syntagma), thematic paper and informational status. The source of the empirical data is the Corpus Discourse & Grammar: the language spoken and written in the city of Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), composed of texts in the spoken modality and their correspondents in written form.