Idiomaticity and Formulaicity in Written Discourse in Portuguese Produced by Mozambique University Students

Abstract

The observation of texts written in Portuguese by Mozambican university students reveals writing difficulties that goes beyond the realm of knowledge of grammatical rules. The mother tongues of most of these students are of Bantu origin and used mainly in restricted or familiar contexts. Unlike Bantu languages, Portuguese, the second language to most of these students, enjoys the status of official language, of teaching, of public administration, of contact with the world, being the language, which confers social prestige in Mozambique. This framework fosters linguistic, discursive, rhetorical, cultural and idiomatic transfers that manifest themselves in a variety of forms of expression peculiar to the languages and cultures in contact, in oral or written communication, and for the present study, emphatically in writing. In this article, we explore the extent to which these students develop fluency and proficiency in the target language through the way they organize linguistic and discursive units to express their world view in the interlingual and intercultural context in which they live. Thus, we selected pieces of discourse from 4 compositions written by them and focus the analysis on how they accommodate aspects of idiomaticity and formulaicity in texts of the opinion genre and within argumentative typology.