A ocorrência de inferências em questões de vestibulares

Abstract

This work proposes to verify how inferential processes are explored in objective questions of the entrance exams at UFPR, Unicamp and Fuvest, from the 2018, 2019 and 2020 selection processes, under a semantic-pragmatic perspective. It is considered that the questions of selection processes offer indicative models of the adequate student’s reading level after the formation of basic education; also, they can be used as material for linguistic analysis in the classroom. Thus, the theoretical research starts from a presentation on the formation of deep reading, based on Wolf (2019), and textual comprehension, based on Marcuschi (2008). Next, the topic of inferences is presented, based on Liberato and Fulgêncio (2010), who support the need to mobilize non-visible information to compose the meaning of a text. The Semantics and Pragmatics literature categorizes inferences into entailment, presupposition and implicature, concepts presented according to Cançado (2008) and Costa (2009). After exposing these concepts, this study discusses two questions from the UERJ entrance exam, classified by the institution’s board as inferential. The corpus is composed by one question from the entrance exam of each university to carry out the analysis. Afterwards, the general panorama regarding the presence of inferences is commented on. We start from the hypothesis that the entailments and presuppositions would be more explored than the implicatures, because the questions of the entrance exams must be based on textual elements. The results show that, despite the implicatures and presuppositions being required, there is a greater occurrence of entailments for the resolution of the questions.