Discursive functions of the judgmental statements in "Papéis Avulsos", by Machado de Assis

Abstract

There are diverse brief and judgmental statements, also named paremias, which form the index of phraseologic units used by the Brazilian author Machado de Assis in his short stories compliation entitled Papéis Avulsos. The aim of this article is to verify the importance of judgmental statements in the configuration of these texts through the analysis of functions that classic or popular paremias, such as proverbs and proverbial sentences, perform in the short stories «O Alienista» and «Teoria do Medalhão», from the aforementioned work. This research is based on the fundaments by Alberto Zuloaga (1997), that divides the funcions of phraseologic units in literary texts in two groups: inherent functions, formed by the basic textual phraseologic function, the connotative or evocative function, the iconic function and the ludic-poetic function; and non-inherent, formed by the process of <>, by the functions of composition or structuring of narrative elements and semantic-stylistic functions.