GRAMMAR and COMMUNICATION IN PORTUGUESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE A Study in the Context of Teletandem Interactions

This paper presents a study about the role of grammar in on-line interactions conducted in Portuguese and in English, between Brazilian and English-speaking interactants, with the aim of teaching Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL). The interactions occurred by means of chat and the MSN Messenger, and generated audio and video data for language analysis. Grammar is dealt with from two perspectives, an inductive and a deductive approach, so as to investigate the relevance of systematization of grammar rules in the process of learning PFL in teletandem interactions.

Peircean semiotics and subject indexing: Contributions of speculative grammar and pure logic

The semiotics of C S. Peirce presents fundamental concepts to discover aspects of the indexing process, including representation and classes of signs. However, we still know little of its theoretical potential for subject indexing. We believe that the main difficulty in the proposals to understand the process of subject indexing based on Peircean semiotics stems from an incomplete interpretation of his semiotic system. This paper attempts to describe the contributions of Peircean semiotics to subject indexing. First, we analyze some of the concepts of the branches of semiotics, after which, we discuss strategies for conceptual approximation. Secondly, and aiming to raise the level of interlocution between the areas, we intend to argue that subject indexing is an inferential process, as explained by the second branch of semiotics. Thus, we seek to go beyond the level of speculative grammar, the first branch of semiotics, to forge a closer link with pure or critical logic, the second branch. We conclude that the indexer's work does not produce a mere reflection of what already exists in documents, but involves an instigating action to discover, through the inferential matrix, the meaning of a text in order to find the subject and the most appropriate subject added entry to the information system.

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Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Interrogativas encaixadas vs. relativas sem antecedente: contribuições da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional

This work deals with the distinction between embedded questions and headless relatives, that was already pointed out as problematic in several studies based on generative approach. The purpose is to examine to what extent functional aspects, as proposed by the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) to describe the two types of clauses can contribute to the explanation of the differences and similarities between them. Based on representative occurrences of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, we demonstrated that the approach of Functional Discourse Grammar provides important parameters for defining the nature of these two types of clauses, in both formal and functional (semantic-discursive) terms, contributing thus to the existing proposals for the distinction between these clauses.