A representação do amor entre adolescentes: uma análise sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the representation(s) of love among teenagers through their lexical-grammatical and semantic-discursive choices. To do such, the theoretical principles of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, more specifically, the system of Transitivity (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004), as well as the system of Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005) were considered. The research corpus consists of 25 personal reports produced by teenagers between the ages of 17 and 18 from the 3rd

year a public high school, located in the city of Santa Maria. The texts produced by the teenagers have as an objective to conceptualize love, as well as showing situations in which this feeling was experienced by them. First, the reports were analyzed under the system of transitivity in order to identify the roles developed by the teenagers, as well as love itself. Secondly, the reports were analyzed according to the subsystem of Attitude, so that it was possible to highlight the evaluations made by the teenagers and their concepts in relation to this feeling. In the end, categories of representation(s) of love were developed. The results showed that teenagers love a little, but feel very much, that is, their role is still much more connected to the Receiver category, the one who receives love than to the Lover category, subject responsible for loving something or someone. Considering the representations of love, it was possible to identify three distinct categories of representations for this feeling: Happy Love, Zealous Love and Altruistic Love. In the first one, love is linked to happiness, while in the second one, we have love as an act of care and protection. The category of Altruistic Love is linked to love as being supportive and not selfish. As a result, it is concluded that for teenagers the existence of love depends on these three categories in order to be effective.