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.

Is your vision consistent? A method for checking, based on scenario concepts

Common sense tells us that the future is an essential element in any strategy. In addition, there is a good deal of literature on scenario planning, which is an important tool in considering the future in terms of strategy. However, in many organizations there is serious resistance to the development of scenarios, and they are not broadly implemented by companies. But even organizations that do not rely heavily on the development of scenarios do, in fact, construct visions to guide their strategies. But it might be asked, what happens when this vision is not consistent with the future? To address this problem, the present article proposes a method for checking the content and consistency of an organization's vision of the future, no matter how it was conceived. The proposed method is grounded on theoretical concepts from the field of future studies, which are described in this article. This study was motivated by the search for developing new ways of improving and using scenario techniques as a method for making strategic decisions. The method was then tested on a company in the field of information technology in order to check its operational feasibility. The test showed that the proposed method is, in fact, operationally feasible and was capable of analyzing the vision of the company being studied, indicating both its shortcomings and points of inconsistency. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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.

O estatuto lexical das preposições sob e sobre

This paper describes the prepositions sob and sobre in the Functional Discourse Grammar framework (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) aiming at checking their lexical or grammatical status on the basis of classification criteria postulated by Keizer (2007). The following aspects point to their lexical status : (i) they consist of an Ascription Subact; (ii) they contain a specific content on the vertical axis signaling inferiority and superiority position in relation to a limit; (iii) they are not required by any predicate, but they are predicates by themselves, which require complementation by an argument playing Reference semantic function; (iv) they may be combined with de, em, para and por; which are genuine grammatical prepositions; and, finally, (v) they are not subjected to any phonological process of reduction and fusion.

Vocativos e o traço basicamente orientador da interação na Gramática Textual-Interativa

Within Textual-interactive Grammar, discourse markers are defined through a particular combination of linguistic features. One of them concerns the interactive role of discourse markers, and it is called “basic orientation of interaction”. As other authors have shown, this feature applies to expressions that play the following functions: Checking, Feedback, Injunction or Initiation. In this paper, we try to demonstrate that the feature under consideration also applies to Vocatives.