Problematizing the lexical item ‘beijo’ (kiss): explicatures and implicatures in a question of the Provinha Brasil

Abstract

Provinha Brasil is an instrument for the Ministério da Educação to assess the level of literacy of second grade Brazilian students in the Ensino Fundamental. Among the descriptors measured by the test, we select “inferring information from reading texts”. In its second edition, which was applied in 2009 at the end of the school year, the twentieth question concerning such a skill was based on a comic strip by Maurício de Sousa. Rauen (2011), curious about the dispersion of the answers to that question as given by ten literacy teachers, as they appear in the thesis by Nazário (2010), analyzed proposition and answer options, coming to conclude that all alternative were plausible. The present paper resumes Rauen’s study, while advancing the thesis that the way the narrowing of the lexical item ‘beijo’ (kiss) occurs in the understanding of that comic strip explains the dispersion of the answers and calls into question the alternative that was considered correct by the evaluation.