Balanço crítico da Sociolinguística Variacionista no estado de São Paulo e a proposição de uma frente programática de investigação

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento em Pesquisa (CNPq)

Estudo acústico das vogais do português brasileiro

In the area of Phonetics, current studies are mainly geared toward acoustic analysis of the speech. The technology of personal computers and available software made these analyses easier to be carried out. The following work used the software called PRAAT. Besides showing how it helps the researcher, the aim of this work is to bring new data for future consultation in this field, allowing comparisons and discussions about this subject. At FONAC, a place where a Project of Departmental Traineeship is run, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Luiz Carlos Cagliari and aimed at training on Acoustic Phonetics for undergraduates and graduates, there is a good quality recording, in which a speaker of the paulista dialect reads an excerpt of Michael Ende and Annegert Fuchshuber’s book named ‘The Dream-eater’ twice. The data obtained through it were analyzed directly or by statistic procedures. Tables and charts, created from these data, helped to visualize the similarities and differences between the vowels allowing an easier comprehension of the articulatory phenomenon. With the formants, specifically, prototypical values for the vowels of Portuguese and the dialect in study were obtained

Localizando o pretérito perfecto compuesto na linha do tempo: o estágio da gramaticalização do PPC nas variedades diatópicas argentinas

The aim of this study was to observe Argentine diatopic varieties and to identify in which stage of the evolution of the pretérito perfecto compuesto (PPC) the use of compound tense fits into these variations. Therefore, we assume as assumptions (I) some authors` description of the evolutionary stages of this verb tense in Spanish, (II) the description of the values assigned to the perfecto compuesto in the dialect regions of Argentina and (III) the contributions of studies on grammaticalization for the verb tenses analysis.

Aniceto dos Reis Gonçalves Viana (1840 - 1914): o linguista em seu tempo

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Aniceto dos Reis Gonçalves Viana (1840 - 1914): o linguista em seu tempo

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Le Antichità di Bologna di Bartolomeo della Pugliola

For a long time, the work of a Franciscan Friar who had lived in Bologna and in Florence during the 13th and 14th centuries, Bartolomeo Della Pugliola, was thought to have been lost. Recent paleographic research, however, has affirmed that most of Della Pugliola’s work, although mixed into other authors, is contained in two manuscripts (1994 and 3843), currently kept at University Library in Bologna. Pugliola’s chronicle is central to Bolognese medieval literature, not only because it was the privileged source for the important work of Ramponis’ chronicle, but also because Bartolomeo della Pugliola’s sources are several significant works such as Jacopo Bianchetti’s lost writings and Pietro and Floriano Villolas’ chronicle (1163-1372). Ongoing historical studies and recent discoveries enabled me to reconstruct the historical chronology of Pugliola’s work as well as the Bolognese language between the 13th and 14th century The original purpose of my research was to add a linguistic commentary to the edition of the text in order to fill the gaps in medieval Bolognese language studies. In addition to being a reliable source, Pugliola’s chronicle was widely disseminated and became a sort of vulgate. The tradition of chronicle, through collation, allows the study of the language from a diachronic point of view. I therefore described all the linguistics phenomena related to phonetics, morphology and syntax in Pugliola’s text and I compared these results with variants in Villola’s and Ramponis’ chronicles. I also did likewise with another chronicle by a 16th century merchant, Friano Ubaldini, that I edited. This supplement helped to complete the Bolognese language outline from the 13th to the 16th century. In order to analize the data that I collected, I tried to approach them from a sociolinguistic point of view because each author represents a different variant of the language: closer to a scripta and the Florentine the language used by Pugliola, closer to the dialect spoken in Bologna the language used by Ubaldini. Differencies in handwriting especially show the models the authors try to reproduce or imitate. The glossary I added at the end of this study can help to understand these nuances with a number of examples.

El español internacional en los medios de comunicación: estudio de un caso de un programa de radio en internet

[ES]El objetivo del presente artículo es demostrar que existe un español internacional (EI) en los medios de comunicación de Hispanoamérica. Para ello, hemos escogido un programa de radio de la norma culta del español Atlántico. Por un lado, analizamos las definiciones que se han realizado del español de los medios de comunicación-lengua especial, Lázaro Carreter, para constatar si coadyuvan a la consolidación del concepto de EI y, por otro lado, realizamos un estudio dialectal con los americanismos léxicos del corpus para verificar hasta qué punto constituyen una isoglosa que impide la inteligibilidad y, por tanto, la no existencia de un EI en los medios de comunicación.

EXAM-S: an Analysis tool for Multi-Domain Policy Sets

As distributed collaborative applications and architectures are adopting policy based management for tasks such as access control, network security and data privacy, the management and consolidation of a large number of policies is becoming a crucial component of such policy based systems. In large-scale distributed collaborative applications like web services, there is the need of analyzing policy interactions and integrating policies. In this thesis, we propose and implement EXAM-S, a comprehensive environment for policy analysis and management, which can be used to perform a variety of functions such as policy property analyses, policy similarity analysis, policy integration etc. As part of this environment, we have proposed and implemented new techniques for the analysis of policies that rely on a deep study of state of the art techniques. Moreover, we propose an approach for solving heterogeneity problems that usually arise when considering the analysis of policies belonging to different domains. Our work focuses on analysis of access control policies written in the dialect of XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language). We consider XACML policies because XACML is a rich language which can represent many policies of interest to real world applications and is gaining widespread adoption in the industry.

Phonetic Aspects of Speech Communication

Nadeina set out to develop methods of speech development in Russian as a mother tongue, focusing on improving diction, training in voice quality control, intonation control, the removal of dialect, and speech etiquette. She began with training in the receptive skills of language, i.e. reading and listening, since the interpretation of someone else's language plays an important role in language production. Her studies of students' reading speed of students showed that it varies between 40 and 120 words per minute, which is normally considered very slow. She discovered a strong correlation between speed of reading and speaking skills: the slower a person reads the worse is their ability to speak and has designed exercises to improve reading skills. Nadeina also believes that listening to other people's speech is very important, both to analyse its content and in some cases as an example, so listening skills need to be developed. Many people have poor pronunciation habits acquired as children. On the basis of speech samples from young Russians (male and female, aged 17-22), Nadeina analysed the commonest speech faults - nasalisation, hesitation and hemming at the end of sense-groups, etc. Using a group of twenty listeners, she looked for a correlation between how voice quality is perceived and certain voice quality parameters, e.g. pitch range, tremulousness, fluency, whispering, harshness, sonority, tension and audible breath. She found that the less non-linguistic segment variations in speech appeared, the more attractive the speech was rated. The results are included in a textbook aimed at helping people to improve their oral skills and to communicate ideas to an audience. She believes this will assist Russian officials in their attempts to communicate their ideas to different social spheres, and also foreigners learning Russian.

Synchronous Description of the Grammatical Structure of Modern Romani and Elaboration of Romani Textbook

The first outcome of this project was a synchronous description of the most widely spoken Romani dialect in the Czech and Slovak Republics, aimed at teachers and lecturers of the Romani language. This is intended to serve as a methodological guide for the demonstration of various grammatical phenomena, but may also assist people who want a basic knowledge of the linguistic structure of this neo-Indian language. The grammatical material is divided into 23 chapters, in a sequence which may be followed in teaching or studying. The book includes examples of the grammatical elements, but not exercises or articles. The second work produced was a textbook of Slovak Romani, which is the most detailed in the Czech or Slovak Republics to date. It is aimed at all those interested in active use of the Romani language: high school and university students, people working with the Roma, and Roma who speak little or nothing of the language of their forebears, The book includes 34 lessons, each containing relevant Romani tests (articles and dialogues), a short vocabulary list, grammatical explanations, exercises and examples of Romani written or oral expression. The textbook also contains a considerable amount of ethno-cultural information and notes on the life and traditions of the Roman, as well as pointing out some differences between different dialects. A brief Romani-Czech phrase book is included as an appendix.

Chinese Internet language: A sociolinguistic analysis of adaptations of the Chinese writing system

This paper examines the adaptations of the writing system in Internet language in mainland China from a sociolinguistic perspective. A comparison is also made of the adaptations in mainland China with those that Su (2003) found in Taiwan. In Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), writing systems are often adapted to compensate for their inherent inadequacies (such as difficulty in input). Su (2003) investigates the creative uses of the writing system on the electronic bulletin boards (BBS) of two college student organizations in Taipei, Taiwan, and identifies four popular and creative uses of the Chinese writing system: stylized English, stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, stylized Taiwanese, and the recycling of a transliteration alphabet used in elementary education. According to Coupland (2001; cited in Su 2003), stylization is “the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context”. Within this framework and drawing on the data in previous publications on Internet language and online sources, this study identifies five types of adaptations in mainland China’s Internet language: stylized Mandarin (e.g., 漂漂 piāopiāo for 漂亮 ‘beautiful’), stylized dialect-accented Mandarin (e.g., 灰常 huīcháng for 非常 ‘very much’), stylized English (e.g., 伊妹儿 yīmèier for ‘email’), stylized initials (e.g., bt 变态 biàntài for ‘abnormal’; pk, short form for ‘player kill’), and stylized numbers (e.g., 9494 jiùshi jiùshi 就是就是 ‘that is it’). The Internet community is composed of highly mobile individuals and thus forms a weak-tie social network. According to Milroy and Milroy (1992), a social network with weak ties is often where language innovation takes place. Adaptations of the Chinese writing system in Internet language provide interesting evidence for the innovations within a weak-tie social network. Our comparison of adaptations in mainland China and Taiwan shows that, in maximizing the effectiveness and functionality of their communication, participants of Internet communication are confronted with different language resources and situations, including differences in Romanization systems, English proficiency level, and attitudes towards English usage. As argued by Milroy and Milroy (1992), a weak-tie social network model can bridge the social class and social network. In the Internet community, the degree of diversity of the stylized linguistic varieties indexes the virtual and/or social status of its participants: the more diversified one’s Internet language is, the higher is his/her virtual and/or social status.

Multilingualism, Legal Drafting and Interpretation of Bilingual Law in Italy

The article begins with a short history of the current Italian language, as an example of a dialect evolving and becoming elevated to the status of a national language. Next, an overview of Italy as characterized by multilingualism and of the different minority languages is offered. A third part is devoted to the different legal languages of Italian law and particularly to the consequences of multilingualism in Italy, which refers to the obligation to draft some local laws in two or tree languages. Multilingual drafting concerns institutions – and therefore concepts – of Italian law which are applied within one single legal system, namely the Italian one, and are merely expressed in a legal language which is not only Italian, but German, French or Ladin. This part is discussed more in deep. The article underlines that legal multilingualism in Italy is a rather unexplored research field. As in Europe there is a clear need for studies inquiring the problem of intepretation and application of mulitlingual law, the praxis and the operative reality of the “regional” legal languages in Italy would probably deserve more attention.

English in England

The intention of the present volume is to unite the research of a range of scholars who have been working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. Features common to an area can be due to (i) shared dialect input, (ii) common but separate innovations after settlement, or (iii) area-internal diffusion from one variety to another and/or others. The relative weighting of these factors is an important topic in the book and is a key focus in the 17 chapters. The book is divided into two large blocks, the first one consisting of case studies (8 chapters) and the second with features complexes (9 chapters). The former look at major anglophone locations from an areal perspective while the latter examine linguistic categories and features with a view to determine whether these could be areally based or not.

Language ideologies: the formation and legitimisation of New Zealand English

New Zealand English first emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of the dialect contact of British (51%), Scottish (27.3%) and Irish (22%) migrants (Hay and Gordon 2008:6). This variety has subsequently developed into an autonomous and legitimised national variety and enjoys a distinct socio-political status, recognition and codification. In fact, a number of dictionaries of New Zealand English have been published1 and the variety is routinely used as the official medium on TV, radio and other media. This however, has not always been the case, as for long only British standard norms were deemed suitable for media broadcasting. While there is some work already on lay commentary about New Zealand English (see for example Gordon 1983, 1994; Hundt 1998), there is much more to be done especially concerning more recent periods of the history of this variety and the ideologies underlying its development and legitimisation. Consequently, the current project aims at investigating the metalinguistic discourses during the period of transition from a British norm to a New Zealand norm in the media context, this will be done by focusing on debates about language in light of the advent of radio and television. The main purpose of this investigation is thus to examine the (language) ideologies that have shaped and underlain these discourses (e.g. discussions about the appropriateness of New Zealand English vis à vis external, British models of language) and their related practices in these media (e.g. broadcasting norms). The sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects of these ideologies will also be taken into account. Furthermore, a comparison will be carried out, at a later stage in the project, between New Zealand English and a more problematic and less legitimised variety: Estuary English. Despite plenty of evidence of media and other public discourses on Estuary English, in fact, there has been very little metalinguistic analysis of this evidence, nor examinations of the underlying ideologies in these discourses. The comparison will seek to discover whether similar themes emerge in the ideologies played out in publish discourses about these varieties, themes which serve to legitimise one variety, whilst denying such legitimacy to the other.