Abordagem cognitiva da construção deverbal x-dor: contribuições para o ensino do português

This work analyzes deverbal nominalizations with the sufix dor in Brazilian Portuguese, under the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, more specifically, the Construction Grammar. The aim is to determine the general features of interpretation that characterize this deverbal construction and its use in formal writing. Based on the cognitive assumption that grammatical structure is motivated, explained, and determined by the structure of cognitive patterns, created from our experience in the world, and by the communicative function of language, the dor deverbal is treated as a polysemic grammatical construction. In the composition of V+dor, the relation rootsuffix is focused, through a characterization of the syntactic-semantic nature of the verb and the values of the suffix. Among the different values conventionally related to the XDOR construction, the agentive is considered as the prototypical sense. The relation between the other values and the prototype is explained by cognitive abilities and discourse motivations. The deverbal construction X-DOR is also interpreted as a valency noun that, like an action nominal, retains the argument structure of the deriving predicate. It is also intended to demonstrate the textual function of this deverbal construction, as a device of information condensing and anaphoric recovery. The data were taken from Veja magazine and the approach is qualitative (explicative), with quantitative support

AI, LA, ALI e AQUI: gramaticalização de um paradigma emergente no domínio funcional da especificação nominal

In the light of the Functional Linguistic Theory, in its North-American version (HOPPER, 1987, 1991, 1998, 2008, 2010; GIVÓN, 2001; LEHMANN, 2002; HOPPER; TRAUGOTT, 2003; FURTADO DA CUNHA; OLIVEIRA; MARTELOTTA, 2003, among others), the general objective of this research is to demonstrate, based on morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic properties, that AQUI (HERE), AÍ, ALI and LÁ (THERE) are part of an emerging paradigm in Brazilian Portuguese recently constituted and still developing of forms indicating specificity in indefinite noun phrases (NP). The data that make up the corpus of this research were collected in the following large Brazilian oral corpora: the Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade de Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), the Banco Conversacional de Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 2010), the Projeto Variação Linguística no Estado da Paraíba VALPB (HORA, 2005) and the Projeto Variação Linguística Urbana na Região Sul do Brasil VARSUL (VANDRESEN, 2002). Firstly, the behavior of the specificity markings AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ is described with respect to many factors of morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic nature: type of construction in which the markers appeared; existence or not of intervening material between the specificity marker item and the NP s nuclear noun; type of noun to which AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ are linked; syntactic function of the specified SN; informational status of the NP to which the specificity markers AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ are attached; occurrence of conversational implicatures (GRICE, 1982) in the context of use of these specificity markers. Next, a possible grammaticalization trajectory is outlined, according to which AQUI, AÍ, ALI and LÁ would had gone from an early spatial deictic indication to the specificity indication. The results point to the existence of forms with varying degree of emergence in this new paradigm of nominal specification, with AÍ being, probably, the item most grammaticalized, followed by LÁ, then ALI and AQUI, which permanence in the paradigm do not yet appear to be consolidated

Um ambiente para especificação e execução AD-HOC de processos de negócio baseados em serviços Web

Recently the focus given to Web Services and Semantic Web technologies has provided the development of several research projects in different ways to addressing the Web services composition issue. Meanwhile, the challenge of creating an environment that provides the specification of an abstract business process and that it is automatically implemented by a composite service in a dynamic way is considered a currently open problem. WSDL and BPEL provided by industry support only manual service composition because they lack needed semantics so that Web services are discovered, selected and combined by software agents. Services ontology provided by Semantic Web enriches the syntactic descriptions of Web services to facilitate the automation of tasks, such as discovery and composition. This work presents an environment for specifying and ad-hoc executing Web services-based business processes, named WebFlowAH. The WebFlowAH employs common domain ontology to describe both Web services and business processes. It allows processes specification in terms of users goals or desires that are expressed based on the concepts of such common domain ontology. This approach allows processes to be specified in an abstract high level way, unburdening the user from the underline details needed to effectively run the process workflow

Geração automática de testes a partir de descrições de linguagens

Some programs may have their entry data specified by formalized context-free grammars. This formalization facilitates the use of tools in the systematization and the rise of the quality of their test process. This category of programs, compilers have been the first to use this kind of tool for the automation of their tests. In this work we present an approach for definition of tests from the formal description of the entries of the program. The generation of the sentences is performed by taking into account syntactic aspects defined by the specification of the entries, the grammar. For optimization, their coverage criteria are used to limit the quantity of tests without diminishing their quality. Our approach uses these criteria to drive generation to produce sentences that satisfy a specific coverage criterion. The approach presented is based on the use of Lua language, relying heavily on its resources of coroutines and dynamic construction of functions. With these resources, we propose a simple and compact implementation that can be optimized and controlled in different ways, in order to seek satisfaction the different implemented coverage criteria. To make the use of our tool simpler, the EBNF notation for the specification of the entries was adopted. Its parser was specified in the tool Meta-Environment for rapid prototyping

AutoWebS: um Ambiente para Modelagem e Geração Automática de ServiçosWeb Semânticos

Typically Web services contain only syntactic information that describes their interfaces. Due to the lack of semantic descriptions of the Web services, service composition becomes a difficult task. To solve this problem, Web services can exploit the use of ontologies for the semantic definition of service s interface, thus facilitating the automation of discovering, publication, mediation, invocation, and composition of services. However, ontology languages, such as OWL-S, have constructs that are not easy to understand, even for Web developers, and the existing tools that support their use contains many details that make them difficult to manipulate. This paper presents a MDD tool called AutoWebS (Automatic Generation of Semantic Web Services) to develop OWL-S semantic Web services. AutoWebS uses an approach based on UML profiles and model transformations for automatic generation of Web services and their semantic description. AutoWebS offers an environment that provides many features required to model, implement, compile, and deploy semantic Web services

PEWS-RT, um sistema de tempo de execução para a linguagem PEWS

Web services are loosely coupled applications that use XML documents as a way of integrating distinct systems on the internet. Such documents are used by in standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI which establish, respectively, integrated patterns for the representation of messages, description, and publication of services, thus facilitating the interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Often one single service does not meet the users needs, therefore new systems can be designed from the composition of two or more services. This which is the design goal behind the of the Service Oriented Architecture. Parallel to this scenario, we have the PEWS (Predicate Path-Expressions for Web Services) language, which speci es behavioural speci cations of composite web service interfaces.. The development of the PEWS language is divided into two parts: front-end and back-end. From a PEWS program, the front-end performs the lexical analysis, syntactic and semantic compositions and nally generate XML code. The function of the back-end is to execute the composition PEWS. This master's dissertation work aims to: (i) reformulate the proposed architecture for the runtime system of the language, (ii) Implement the back-end for PEWS by using .NET Framework tools to execute PEWS programs using the Windows Work ow Foundation

Análise sintagmática aplicada ao processo de sumarização automática de documentos do português brasileiro

This research studies the application of syntagmatic analysis of written texts in the language of Brazilian Portuguese as a methodology for the automatic creation of extractive summaries. The automation of abstracts, while linked to the area of natural language processing (PLN) is studying ways the computer can autonomously construct summaries of texts. For this we use as presupposed the idea that switch to the computer the way a language is structured, in our case the Brazilian Portuguese, it will help in the discovery of the most relevant sentences, and consequently build extractive summaries with higher informativeness. In this study, we propose the definition of a summarization method that automatically perform the syntagmatic analysis of texts and through them, to build an automatic summary. The phrases that make up the syntactic structures are then used to analyze the sentences of the text, so the count of these elements determines whether or not a sentence will compose the summary to be generated

Escrita colaborativa com google docs: flash fiction, noticing e aprendizagem de inglês como L2

Google Docs (GD) is an online word processor with which multiple authors can work on the same document, in a synchronous or asynchronous manner, which can help develop the ability of writing in English (WEISSHEIMER; SOARES, 2012). As they write collaboratively, learners find more opportunities to notice the gaps in their written production, since they are exposed to more input from the fellow co-authors (WEISSHEIMER; BERGSLEITHNER; LEANDRO, 2012) and prioritize the process of text (re)construction instead of the concern with the final product, i.e., the final version of the text (LEANDRO; WEISSHEIMER; COOPER, 2013). Moreover, when it comes to second language (L2) learning, producing language enables the consolidation of existing knowledge as well as the internalization of new knowledge (SWAIN, 1985; 1993). Taking this into consideration, this mixed-method (DÖRNYEI, 2007) quasi-experimental (NUNAN, 1999) study aims at investigating the impact of collaborative writing through GD on the development of the writing skill in English and on the noticing of syntactic structures (SCHMIDT, 1990). Thirtyfour university students of English integrated the cohort of the study: twenty-five were assigned to the experimental group and nine were assigned to the control group. All learners went through a pre-test and a post-test so that we could measure their noticing of syntactic structures. Learners in the experimental group were exposed to a blended learning experience, in which they took reading and writing classes at the university and collaboratively wrote three pieces of flash fiction (a complete story told in a hundred words), outside the classroom, online through GD, during eleven weeks. Learners in the control group took reading and writing classes at the university but did not practice collaborative writing. The first and last stories produced by the learners in the experimental group were analysed in terms of grammatical accuracy, operationalized as the number of grammar errors per hundred words (SOUSA, 2014), and lexical density, which refers to the relationship between the number of words produced with lexical properties and the number of words produced with grammatical properties (WEISSHEIMER, 2007; MEHNERT, 1998). Additionally, learners in the experimental group answered an online questionnaire on the blended learning experience they were exposed to. The quantitative results showed that the collaborative task led to the production of more lexically dense texts over the 11 weeks. The noticing and grammatical accuracy results were different from what we expected; however, they provide us with insights on measurement issues, in the case of noticing, and on the participants‟ positive attitude towards collaborative writing with flash fiction. The qualitative results also shed light on the usefulness of computer-mediated collaborative writing in L2 learning.

Padrões de ordenação de constituintes das construções V2/V3 superficiais em cartas pessoais brasileiras dos séculos 19 e 20

In line with the model of grammar competition (Kroch, 1989; 2001), according to which the change in the syntactic domains is a process that develops via competition between different grammars, we describe and analyze the superficial constructions V2 / V3 in matrices / roots sentences of brazilian personal letters of the 19th and 20th centuries. The corpus, composed by 154 personal letters of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Norte, is divided into three century halves: (i) latter half of the 19th century; (ii) first half of the 20th century; and (iii) latter half of the 20th century. Our focus was the observation of the nature of preverbal constituents in superficial constructions V2 (verb in second position in the sentence) and V3 (verb in third position in the sentence), with a special attention on the position of the subject. Based on the various diachronical studies about the Portuguese ordination standards (Ambar (1992); Ribeiro (1995, 2001); Paixão de Sousa (2004); Paiva (2011), Coelho and Martins (2009, 2012)), our study sought to realize what are empirical ordination standards that involve superficial constructions V2 / V3 and how these patterns structure syntactically within a formal theoretical perspective (Chomsky, 1981; 1986), more specifically, in accordance with studies of Antonelli (2011), and Costa & Galves (2002). The survey results show that the data from the second half of the 19th century – unlike the first and second half of the 20th century data – have a greater balance in relation to the syntactic nature of preverbal constituent (contiguous or not), so that, in this period, the occurrence of orders with the subject in a preverbal position arrives at, at most, 52% (231/444 data); while in the 48% (213/444 data) remaining, the preverbal constituents are represented by a non-subject constituent, almost always an adverbial adjunct. Seen the results, we advocate that the brazilian personal letters of the 19th century have ordination patterns associated with a V2 system and an SV system, configuring, therefore, a possible competition process between different grammars that instantiate or a V2 system or an SV system. In other words, the brazilian letters of the 19th century instantiate a competition between the grammar of Classic Portuguese (a V2 system) and the grammars of Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese (an SV system). Therefore, that period is subject to the completion of two distinct parametric markings: (i) verb moved to the Fin core (grammar of Classic Portuguese) and (ii) verb moved to the T core (grammar of Brazilian Portuguese /European Portuguese). On the other hand, in the personal letters of the 20th century (first and second halves), there is a clear increase in ordenation patterns associated with the SV system, which shows more stable.

A correlação locução adjetiva/adjetivo: uma análise funcional

This research deals with the relationship locução adjetiva / adjective, focusing the reasons for using one form or the other one, in situations where the speaker has a choice between an adjective or a locução adjetiva virtually correspondent and vice versa. In general, the objective is to investigate the possibility of correlation between locução adjetiva and adjective, and to identify motivations for the use of one form or the other one. The theoretical support of this paper is the Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso (LFCU), which groups together theoretical and methodological assumptions of North American Functional Linguistics, represented by authors as Givón (1984), Bybee (2010), Traugott (2011), and Cognitive Linguistics, as developed by Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (2002). As regards the methodological procedures, this research is of qualitative and quantitative character: at first, we did the survey data in the texts that made up the corpus, followed by analysis of each them, especially the locução adjetiva, by considering the semantic, morphosyntactic, cognitive and pragmatic aspects. The corpus is composed of 36 texts, taken from 12 issues of the Veja magazine, published between January 2013 and March 2013. As for the results, in the case of locução adjetiva with related adjectives, this research has shown that the choice of former is due to semantic change, the use of lexicalized forms, to priming cases or to stylistic motivations. It means that the choices of one of these two forms go beyond lexical issues, since there are other motivations, such as syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ones.

O slogan empresarial como construção discursiva: uma abordagem cognitivo-funcional

In this paper, we analyze corporate slogans, understanding them as a discursive construction that is, as a pairing of form and function able to unite the notions of textual type and discursive genre. In this way, we developed a qualitative and quantitative analysis, aimed specifically to analyze the formal properties (phonetic, morphological and syntactic) and functional (semantic, pragmatic and discursive) of slogans. Furthermore, we attempted at verifying and quantifying recurring aspects involved in their construction, in order to capture configurational patterns underlying their formation. The data come from slogans collected in products and / or service stores in the metropolitan area of Natal city, Rio Grande do Norte. This research is based on the Cognitive-Functional Linguistics, that conjugates the North American functionalist tradition, represented by researchers as Talmy Givón, Paul Hopper, Joan Bybee, Elizabeth Closs-Traugott, with Cognitive Linguistics, in particular, the chain linked to Construction Grammar, as postulated by Adele Goldberg, William Croft e Jan-Olla Östman, among others. The results ratified the importance of the interface between the formal and functional aspects in the analysis of linguistic uses. These results point to the idea of the slogan as the pairing of form and function on textual / discursive level, in other words, as a discursive construction, constituting as cognitive storage of a scheme / model of textual formation with a specific discursive-pragmatic function.

A responsabilidade enunciativa em artigos científicos de pesquisadores iniciantes e contribuições para o ensino da produção textual na graduação

This thesis investigates materialization strategies of non-assumption of enunciation responsibility and inscription of an authorial voice in scientific articles produced by initial researchers in Linguistics. The specific focus lays on identify, describe and interpret: i) linguistics marks that assign enunciation responsibility; ii) the positions taken by the first speaker-enunciator (L1/E1) in relation to points of view (PoV) imputed to second enunciators (e2); and iii) the linguistic marks that assign the formulation of themselves' PoV. As a practical deployment, it is proposed to discuss how to teach taking into account text discursive strategies regarding to enunciation responsibility and also authorship in academic and scientific texts. Our research corpus is formed by eight scientific essays and they were selected in a renamed Linguistics scientific magazine which is high evaluated by Qualis/CAPES (Brazil Science Agency). The methodology follows the assumptions of a qualitative research, and an it has such an interpretative basis, even though it takes support in a quantitative approach, too. Theoretically, we based this research on Textual Analysis of Speech and linguistics theories about linguistic enunciation area. The results show two kinds of movements in PoV management: imputation and responsibility. In imputation contexts, the most recursive linguistic marks were reported speech, indirect speech, reported speech with “that”, modalization in reported speech (in enunciation with “according to”, “in agreement with”, “for”), beyond that we see certain points of non-coincidences of speech, specifically the non-coincidence of the speech itself. The way those linguistic marks occur in the text point out three kinds of enunciation positions that are assumed by L1/E1 in relation to PoV of e2: agreement, disagreement and a pseudo neutrality. It was clearly recursive the imputation followed by agreement (explicit or not), this perspective puts other’s voices to defend a speech assumed like own authorship. In speech responsibility contexts, we observed such a formulation of inner PoV that results from theoretical findings undertaken by novice researchers (revealing how he/she interpreted concepts of the theory) or arising from their research data, allowing them to express with more autonomy and without reporting to speeches from e2. Based on those data, we can say that, in text by initial researchers, the authorship is strongly built upon PoV and also dependent from others' words (theory and the scholars quoted there), taking into account that many contexts in which we can observe agreement position, PoV formulations with words taken from e2 and assumed as own words by syntactic integration, the comments about what the other says, the absence of explanations and additions, as well as a data analysis that could show agreement with the theory used to support the work. These results allow us to visualize how initial researcher dialogs with the theoretical enunciation sources he or she takes as support and how he/she displays the status of a subject doing a research and positioning himself/herself as a researcher/author in the scientific field. In assuming the reported speech, when quoting, as a resource that allows the enunciation responsibility and also when doing evidence to the positions of speaker-enunciator in relation do reported PoV, this suggests to a textual-discursive treatment of quoting in academic and scientific text, in a context of teaching that gives attention to the development of communication skills of initial researcher and that can contribute to insert and interact students in the scientific field.

A responsabilidade enunciativa em artigos científicos de pesquisadores iniciantes e contribuições para o ensino da produção textual na graduação

This thesis investigates materialization strategies of non-assumption of enunciation responsibility and inscription of an authorial voice in scientific articles produced by initial researchers in Linguistics. The specific focus lays on identify, describe and interpret: i) linguistics marks that assign enunciation responsibility; ii) the positions taken by the first speaker-enunciator (L1/E1) in relation to points of view (PoV) imputed to second enunciators (e2); and iii) the linguistic marks that assign the formulation of themselves' PoV. As a practical deployment, it is proposed to discuss how to teach taking into account text discursive strategies regarding to enunciation responsibility and also authorship in academic and scientific texts. Our research corpus is formed by eight scientific essays and they were selected in a renamed Linguistics scientific magazine which is high evaluated by Qualis/CAPES (Brazil Science Agency). The methodology follows the assumptions of a qualitative research, and an it has such an interpretative basis, even though it takes support in a quantitative approach, too. Theoretically, we based this research on Textual Analysis of Speech and linguistics theories about linguistic enunciation area. The results show two kinds of movements in PoV management: imputation and responsibility. In imputation contexts, the most recursive linguistic marks were reported speech, indirect speech, reported speech with “that”, modalization in reported speech (in enunciation with “according to”, “in agreement with”, “for”), beyond that we see certain points of non-coincidences of speech, specifically the non-coincidence of the speech itself. The way those linguistic marks occur in the text point out three kinds of enunciation positions that are assumed by L1/E1 in relation to PoV of e2: agreement, disagreement and a pseudo neutrality. It was clearly recursive the imputation followed by agreement (explicit or not), this perspective puts other’s voices to defend a speech assumed like own authorship. In speech responsibility contexts, we observed such a formulation of inner PoV that results from theoretical findings undertaken by novice researchers (revealing how he/she interpreted concepts of the theory) or arising from their research data, allowing them to express with more autonomy and without reporting to speeches from e2. Based on those data, we can say that, in text by initial researchers, the authorship is strongly built upon PoV and also dependent from others' words (theory and the scholars quoted there), taking into account that many contexts in which we can observe agreement position, PoV formulations with words taken from e2 and assumed as own words by syntactic integration, the comments about what the other says, the absence of explanations and additions, as well as a data analysis that could show agreement with the theory used to support the work. These results allow us to visualize how initial researcher dialogs with the theoretical enunciation sources he or she takes as support and how he/she displays the status of a subject doing a research and positioning himself/herself as a researcher/author in the scientific field. In assuming the reported speech, when quoting, as a resource that allows the enunciation responsibility and also when doing evidence to the positions of speaker-enunciator in relation do reported PoV, this suggests to a textual-discursive treatment of quoting in academic and scientific text, in a context of teaching that gives attention to the development of communication skills of initial researcher and that can contribute to insert and interact students in the scientific field.

A forma do privilégio: renda, acessibilidade e densidade em Natal-RN

The aim of this work is to understand the morphological expression of ground occupation by the higher income population, by focusing on population distribution in accordance with income layers and demographical density, as well as topological accessibility (HILLIER and HANSON, 1984) resulting from the urban grid structure. It endeavors to identify a functional organizing principle regarding the intra-urban space of Natal capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, the research focus. In order to achieve this, census data as well as syntactic data were utilized for mapping and spatial analysis of income patterns, topological accessibility and demographical density using Geographical Information System GIS. The organizing principle was named as the Form of Privilege, a pattern that concentrates or tends to concentrate wealth, topological accessibility and low demographical density. Attempting to assess its extent, beyond Natal, this principle was applied to other Brazilian northeastern capitals such as: Fortaleza, CE; Teresina, PI; Aracaju, SE; Recife, PE; and João Pessoa, PB. Findings point out that although the urban structures of these cities are not immune to the Form of Privilege, Natal is emblematic of this phenomenon, a fact that demonstrates the perverse character of its spatial process, which historically creates privileged areas within the city, by means of the appropriation of accessibility as well as of the many urban benesses that are related to it by higher income groups at the expense of the major part of the population, which though being the people mostly in need of the benefits originating from the urban form are excluded from them

Desenvolvimento de filtros cerâmicos impregnados com nanopartículas de prata para desinfecção de água potável

Brazil has vast amounts of hydric resources, whose quality has been deteriorating due to pollutant dumping. Household waste disposal is one of the main sources of water pollution, stimulating bacteria proliferation and introducing microorganisms, including those from fecal matter. Conventional water disinfection methods are a solution, but on the downside, they lead to the formation byproducts hazardous to human health. In this study, aiming to develop bactericidal filters for the disinfection of drinking water; silver nanoparticles were deposited on alumina foams through three routes: sputtering DC, dip coating and in situ chemical reduction of silver nitrate. The depositions were characterized through X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and EDS element mapping. The influence of the depositions on permeability and mechanical properties of the ceramic foams was assessed and, in sequence, a preliminary antibacterial efficiency analysis was carried out. Characterization results indicate that the chemical reduction routes were efficient in depositing homogeneously distributed silver particles and that the concentration of the metallic precursor salt affects size and morphology of the particles. The antibacterial efficiency analysis indicates that the chemical reduction filters have potential for water disinfection