Time for ‘metalinguistics’: in favour of a “critical” syntactic analysis in basic education

Abstract

By discussing the place of metalinguistic activities in Basic Education, the main goal of this paper is to present a “critical” approach to the syntactic analysis to be developed in Basic Education, the “Critical Syntactic Analysis”. The adjective “critic” given to the approach must be understood above all by its commitment in creating conditions so that the students of basic education really see themselves as producers and authors of the syntactic analysis. As a methodological ingredient for the syntactic analysis (to be developed in middle and high school), it is suggested that teachers elicitate grammaticality judgments among students – a methodological tool which is typical in the generative enterprise. For the specific case of grammatical roles/syntactic functions, the task should take into account tokens combining the constituent whose grammatical role one wants to determine with another constituent allegedly having the same role/function. By using two ambiguous headlines from Brazilian newspapers, it is offered a methodological guide – theoretically oriented, though — on how to proceed with a “critical” syntactic analysis. It seeks to argue in favor of the metalinguistic analysis and its importance in the construction of argumentation.