Aquisição de verbos da língua portuguesa, no primeiro ciclo de escolaridade, por crianças bilingues luso-alemãs e crianças monolingues alemãs

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Linguagem (área de especialização em Linguística Aplicada).

Analysis and strengthening of carpentry joints

Joints play a major role in the structural behaviour of old timber frames [1]. Current standards mainly focus on modern dowel-type joints and usually provide little guidance (with the exception of German and Swiss NAs) to designers regarding traditional joints. With few exceptions, see e.g. [2], [3], [4], most of the research undertaken today is mainly focused on the reinforcement of dowel-type connections. When considering old carpentry joints, it is neither realistic nor useful to try to describe the behaviour of each and every type of joint. The discussion here is not an extra attempt to classify or compare joint configurations [5], [6], [7]. Despite the existence of some classification rules which define different types of carpentry joints, their applicability becomes difficult. This is due to the differences in the way joints are fashioned depending, on the geographical location and their age. In view of this, it is mandatory to check the relevance of the calculations as a first step. This first step, to, is mandatory. A limited number of carpentry joints, along with some calculation rules and possible strengthening techniques are presented here.

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese: verb movement, VP ellipsis and adverb placement

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that crosslinguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.