A noção de relação na teoria linguística de Ferdinand de Saussure

Our work aims at investigating the notion of relation in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic reflections. As we observe his theoretical production, we see this notion was amply worked in the elaboration of other concepts of his, for example, language, signe, value, arbitrariness, among others. However, beyond the capacity of the notion of relation to produce other concepts, the way it was conceived and the theoretical space it was placed allowed Saussure to break through the essentially historical-comparative studies of the epoch, what made a new way of thinking language to have its starting point. Taking it into account, firstly, by reading the work of Herman Paul, the one who represents the neogrammarians in our text, we examine in which way Saussure is distant from his contemporary linguistics when he distinguishes the linguistic relations and give them a new status in his investigation. Secondly, we study how the notion of relation has it own place in Saussure’s theoretical process of thinking the fundamentals which later would be considered the milestone for Modern Linguistics. For that, we analyse one of his manuscripts, Notes pour un livre sur la linguistique générale, and the Course in General Linguistics. The first is composed by sketches which would become a book, as Saussure promised in a letter to Meillet; and the latter contains the principals for the science of Linguistics. So we aim at researching how the notion of relation is treated in this corpus in order to see the way it is conceived both in the particular production of a manuscript written by Saussure itself and the book which was published and considered the turning point for Linguistics.

Normalização de dispositivos móveis no processo de aprendizagem de inglês : um estudo à luz da complexidade

We live in a world inherently influenced by technology and in which education is immersed in realities made possible by the support of digital technologies, such as electronic mobile devices. Thus, the general aim of this study lies in mapping and analysing the influence of mobile devices on teaching, especially with reference to learning the English language. The specific aims are to investigate how the use of mobile devices is present in the research participants’ practices, consider whether such use is beneficial, according to the students, to the English language learning as well as mapping how the use of mobile devices favours the normalisation stage, taken in this research as a complex process.The theoretical background of this study includes the premises of the Paradigm of Complexity, especially concerning the acquisition of a second language, as well as the precepts of Normalisation, which is related to the total integration of digital technologies into the English teaching and learning process in such a way that they become invisible, and the theories of language learning mediated by computers and mobile devices. Methodologically, this is an ethnographic qualitative research and its context is a language institute located in the Triângulo Mineiro region. In addition to students from five groups in the institution, two teachers and an administrative assistant participated in the survey. Data was collected through an online questionnaire, learning reports produced by students and interviews with teachers and administrative staff. The analyses indicate that mobile devices are present in the daily practices of English learners, but these uses, in most cases, are carried out through the teacher's encouragement. Moreover, despite having positive sayings on the role of digital technologies in the process of English teaching and learning, there is, among students and teachers, a dichotomy between saying and doing about the learning contexts considered valid. Additionally, the use of mobile devices in the English learning process is not yet established as a normalised issue because the process of integration of technology in teaching is still ruled by traditional uses of the technology. I conclude that the use of mobile devices in the English learning process is still not normalised, because even if students use their mobile devices every day, they generally do not realize the affordances of such use as possibilities to learn English.

O /R/ em posição de coda silábica na cidade de Uberlândia

The aim of this research is to describe and analyze the realization of the /R/ at the end of the syllable (coda) in the city of Uberlândia-MG, taking into account variationist aspects and possible phonological phenomena that permeates the variable realization of this segment. We used the labovian variationist methodology, that gave us the needed support to investigate and systematize the variation of one linguistic community. The corpus was compound by 5139 occurrences of /R/, which 2528 were retroflex realizations, 2480 were deletions and 132 were occurrences of other segments. The informants of this research were stratified by: sex; age group; scholarly; they were born in Uberlândia or they arrived in this city before fifth birthday. Beyond the extralinguistic variables (sex, age group and scholarty), we established as linguistic variables: following context; previous context; tonicity of syllable; lexical item; coda position in the syllable; and, at last, the word size. After the statistic analisis computed by the Goldvarb software, the favoring contexts to the retroflex realization were: coronal segments in the following context; labial segments in the previous context; unstressed syllables; nouns and others (non verbs); and words with one syllable. The favoring contexts to deletion were: dorsal segments int the following context and verbs. The extra linguistic variables favored the variation less scholarty. So, the factors male sex and age group from 26 to 49 years favored the retroflex variant, while the factors female and the age group with more than 49 years favored the deletion.

A noção de sistema na fundação da linguística moderna

This work is intended to investigate the saussurian notion of system. Such a notion is fundamental to Ferdinand de Saussure's theorization, since it composes the definition of "langue", as he thought it. This definition was crucial to the delimitation of linguistics' specific object of study, which granted its place among modern sciences. However, the notion of system was not created by Saussure. Not only in Linguistics, but also in other areas, this notion appeared in very ancient studies, mingling with the establishment of man in society and the development of their economic and organizational activities. Specifically, in the context of language studies, the system consists in a notion that composed the work of the first grammarians in the West, in ancient Greece. Moreover, this notion was also used afterwards, in the synonymy studies and in the comparative analysis of languages, developed by scholars of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, although Saussure had had his formation in Leipzig and Berlim, amid comparatists studies, his notion of system is an innovation, while is also continuing. In light of this, we aim to highlight the aspects of the saussurian notion of system that allow the establishment of a relationship of continuity and rupture with other conceptions of system. For that, we will investigate four Saussure authored documents: the « Cours de linguistique générale », the « Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes », and the two sets of manuscripts « De l'essence double du langage » and « Notes pour le cours III ».