LA COMUNIDAD SORDA: DEL TRAZO A LA LENGUA ESCRITA.

In Argentina, as in many other countries of the region, even today deaf people finish school as functional illiterates, with no knowledge of the pragmatic and sociocultural values of the written language. However, deaf young people are nowadays learning to read and write through Internet, e-mail, chat and SMS. This article gives evidence of their appropriation of a complex object as written language and from a non scholastic discursive practice as writing through emails. From a theoretical framework of textual grammar, the authors analyze and describe the text functions in a specific communicative situation. Their analysis includes not only the syntactic but also the discursive activity (the attitudes of the textual producer and consumer). The results show how the deaf are mastering the symbolic values of written language although they are still unaware of the pragmatic adequateness of gender and register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]