O uso de orações passivas sintéticas na escrita acadêmica: uma análise de artigos de conclusão de curso

Abstract

This article aimed to documentarily analyze scientific articles to verify the issue of subject-verb agreement in synthetic passive constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. Based on the teaching requirements for passive voice constructions for basic education, as presented in the Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC), and the relationship of usage between active and passive voice presented by Furtado da Cunha (2000), it sought to discuss, drawing on previous studies by Duarte (2009), Santos Silva (2021), Nascimento and Xavier (2021), and Sedrins (2021), the tendency of "se" to lose its function as a passive pronoun, being predominantly used as a subject indeterminer, even in formal contexts. Therefore, this study investigated the hypothesis that the use of the synthetic passive is predominantly a construction learned in formal writing and is not natural in spoken language. To explore this issue, the methodology of this study included classifying and contextualizing occurrences of "se" as a passive particle and as a subject indetermination index in 20 academic texts by educated informants. The results obtained from this methodology recorded 24 occurrences of the synthetic passive requiring plural agreement, of which 10 did not comply with this grammatical rule. The examples of inadequacies in subject-verb agreement suggest evidence of the erasure of the passive function of "se," favoring its classification as a subject indeterminer, both with intransitive and indirectly transitive verbs as well as with directly transitive verbs, thus corroborating our initial hypothesis.