USING SEMANTICS AS A WAY TO UNDERSTAND TEXTUAL GENRES

This paper examines the perception of the characteristics of a set of Textual Genres based on Linguistic Analysis, drawing on a Textual Linguistics investigation and offering Semantics considerations as support. This is an attempt to show how relevant semantic investigations are to extend a perception on the characteristics of Textual Genres, without excluding pragmatic and discourse elements. The texts analyzed in this study were taken from a questionnaire designed to assess freshman and senior university students from courses of Bachelor of Arts in Language, in terms of knowledge about different Textual Genres and their characteristics. The analyses focus on the semantic elements that act in respect of question and answer in the questionnaire, and which include: A Semantics-Pragmatics interface, the considerations of the propositional calculus, the theories of tense and aspect of verbal and semantic primitives. On these terms, it is set a relationship between the cognitive mechanisms that operate in the production and reception of texts and a look at the functions that organize semantic text processing. The main analysis in this paper will concern the interface of Textual Linguistics, from authors as Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) and Adam (2011), with Semantic investigations in terms of meaning processing.

The alternation of pronoun forms te and lhe in personal letters of Ceará

This study aims to analyze the alternation of pronouns “te” and “lhe” for the 2nd PESS SING, in personal letters written in Portuguese in the State of Ceará, Brazil, during the twentieth century, in the light of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972, 1994). The sample to be analyzed is composed of 186 personal letters. It seeks to investigate the actions of groups of linguistic factors tense and pronoun position in relation to the verb in the alternation of social forms. Then are presented the results of this alternation by senders of the letters, in order to refine the analysis and describe the distribution of these forms by author. Data were submitted to the computer program GoldVarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005) and indicate that the alternation “te”/“lhe” presents percentages rather balanced when considering the analysis of all the letters. In the analysis by sender, the results demonstrate that there are authors who only used “te”, and authors only used “lhe”, and authors that make the alternation “te” / “lhe” in their writing.