Textos Videossinalizados na Internet: Uma Descrição Centrada no Uso da Libras no Meio Eletrônico

Abstract

The growing participation of deaf people in society has expanded the possibilities for spreading sign languages, cultural and linguistic immersion, building identities and exchanging experiences among deaf people. These interactions, throughout history, were limited to churches, communities and associations of deaf people, gained new spaces, thanks to the formulation of linguistic and public policies aimed at deaf people and, above all, the advent of technology. The internet, as a significant product of technological advances, has consolidated itself as a potential space for engagement between signaling users, driving new dynamics of communication and interaction. In the words of Marcuschi (2010a, p. 16) “the internet is a kind of prototype of new forms of communicative behavior” and constitutes the largest existing linguistic corpus (Crystal, 2011). Its data storage capacity and management resources, which are increasingly interactive, have favored the manifestation of different forms of language and, mainly, the accommodation of complex linguistic systems such as visual-spatial ones. In view of this, this research focuses on situations of use of the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) in the electronic environment, aiming to increase visibility about Libras, its signers and the resources for expanding political, linguistic and social strength. This thesis aims to characterize how the categories of speaking, writing and interaction with deaf people affect the linguistic realization of Libras in the context of the internet, in addition to presenting a description of the way in which Libras has incorporated the properties of the electronic medium into its experience of language, given that the internet has specific rules for the circulation and dissemination of texts for online access. This is a qualitative and applied research, linked to the line of research “Analysis and Description of Languages” and based on Internet Linguistics (Crystal, 2011) and Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994). The Internet Linguistics seeks to recognize, theorize and describe the theoretical and methodological principles of the formal properties of internet language, to which Libras is subject. Systemic-Functional Linguistics, in turn, understands language as a resource in which meanings are created and materialized in grammar according to systemic patterns of choices, whose organization depends on the relationship between text, context and social practices for characterization of human experience, according to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The corpus of analysis consists of a selection of video-signaled texts, contained in public online text repositories. The recognition and description of the way in which Libras is carried out, according to the properties of the internet language, provides us with parameters to understand the linguistic, cultural and social transformations of Brazilian sign language, as well as the nuances of this linguistic system within the modes of communication human. The results of our analyses indicate that the main implications for the implementation of Libras on the internet reside in (i) the accommodation of multisemiotic resources linked to the dynamic modes of speech, writing, and signing; (ii) the adaptation of linguistic parameters to the characteristics of the electronic medium; (iii) the fluid and accelerated orientation of the dissemination of video-signed texts; and, above all, in (iv) the cultural codification that guides the purposes and communicative needs of signers, resulting in phenomena of pronunciation variations, linguistic economy, hybridism between speech, writing, and signing, neologisms and slang, linguistic accessibility increased by technological resources, in addition to new dynamics of interaction and construction of meanings.