Uma descrição do processo de referenciação em narrativas contadas em língua de sinais brasileira (libras) 

This thesis aims at presenting a description of the reference process in a narrative retold in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), starting with the analysis of how the signer introduces and refers back to the characters in the narrative studied.This description was based on works developed within the Cognitive Linguistics framework, mainly on van Hoek (1997), used for the description of reference, and Liddell (2003), for the analysis of signed discourses.Signed languages -particulary Libras -are rather understudied, so they are still in an initial description stage.Reference, which regards the use of certain forms for the coding of referents in specific points in the discourse, has already been widely discussed in works on spoken languages.However, most of these analyses have been based on the linearity of these languages and, as a consequence, they have explained the coding form choice in terms of the distance between the mentioning of a referent.This approach does not seem to be appropriate for signed languages, which, being gestural-visual languages, have their discourse spatially organized and their correference relations strongly associated with a signer's organization of the signing space.