O uso do artigo neutro 'lo' por aprendizes de espanhol como língua estrangeira : uma questão de língua e leitura

Abstract

This thesis is the study of the use of the neutral article "lo" by undergraduate Spanish learners as a foreign language, approached in two perspectives of analysis: as a grammatical structure and as a lexical-semantic object of reading. As a general objective, the research proposes to analyze, describe and explain the use of the neutral article in written texts and in readings, taking into account the comprehension that undergraduates have of them. In the development of the theme, the theoretical framework that supports the investigation starts with the discussion of concepts such as acquisition and learning, as well as the native language and foreign language, with their terminological variants, and undergoes some reading concepts in L1 and L2, considered relevant. The Contrastive Linguistics is approached with the necessary scope in three theoretical and practical models, which are, Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage Analysis. Linguistic structures are confronted, equivalences and contrasts are identified, and the processes that lead to the production of errors and rightness, which can be understood as an interlinguistic mark of the learners. As for the method, the descriptive analysis was used that, besides examining and describing important concepts, tries to explain them, compares theories, describes and analyses data collected through survey instruments. Thus, after analyzing the data, we came up to some conclusions: most of the errors produced with the use of the articles occurred in relation to the neutral, using it in situations where the masculine gender should have been used, or using the masculine gender when the neutral should be used; in certain situations, the neutral article takes up the space of the masculine article, motivated by the process of hypercorrection, the grammatical class of the word that follows the neutral article is the determinant factor for it to be used accurately; the neutral "lo", classified as an article by the grammar of the Spanish language, behaves, in some situations, as a pronoun, because it can be replaced by the neutral demonstrative pronoun; there is also a neutral "o" in the Portuguese language, although in this language it is classified as a demonstrative pronoun, and not as an article; despite the use of the article "lo" be commonly treated as a grammatical phenomenon, the analysis undertaken in this thesis proves that using it accurately depends not only on the knowledge of Spanish grammar, but also on the capability of reading in L2, i.e., that the Spanish learner using appropriate learning strategies and perform the proper inferences during the reading process.