Model of a specialized bidirectional dictionary for German and Portuguese

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Terminologia e Gestão da Informação de Especialidade

Validation of the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition in Portuguese speakers aged 4 to 10 years

The phonological loop is a component of the working memory system specifically involved in the processing and manipulation of limited amounts of information of a sound-based phonological nature. Phonological memory can be assessed by the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep) in English speakers but not in Portuguese speakers due to phonotactic differences between the two languages. The objectives of the present study were: 1) to develop the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition (BCPR), a Portuguese version of the CNRep, and 2) to validate the BCPR by correlation with the Auditory Digit Span Test from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The BCPR and Digit Span were assessed in 182 children aged 4-10 years, 84 from Minas Gerais State (42 from a rural region) and 98 from the city of São Paulo. There are subject age and word length effects causing repetition accuracy to decline as a function of the number of syllables of the pseudowords. Correlations between BCPR and Digit Span forward (r = 0.50; P <= 0.01) and backward (r = 0.43; P <= 0.01) were found, and partial correlation indicated that higher BCPR scores were associated with higher Digit Span scores. BCPR appears to depend more on schooling, while Digit Span was more related to development. The results demonstrate that the BCPR is a reliable measure of phonological working memory, similar to the CNRep.

“You Know What I Mean?”- Language and Cultural Retention in Luso-Canadian Mothers in the Greater Toronto Area

The Portuguese community is one of the largest diasporic groups in the Greater Toronto Area and the choice of retention and transmission of language and culture to Luso-Canadians is crucial to the development and sustainability of the community. The overall objective of this study is to learn about the factors that influence Luso-Canadian mothers’ inclination to teach Portuguese language and cultural retention to their children. To explore this topic I employed a qualitative research design that included in-depth interviews conducted in 2012 with six Luso-Canadian mothers. Three central arguments emerged from the findings. First, Luso-Canadian mothers interviewed posses a pronounced desire for their children to succeed academically, and to provide opportunities that their children that they did not have. Second, five of the mothers attempt to achieve this mothering objective partly by disconnecting from their Portuguese roots, and by disassociating their children from the Portuguese language and culture. Third, the disconnection they experience and enact is influenced by the divisions evident in the Portuguese community in the GTA that divides regions and hierarchically ranks dialects, and groups. I conclude that the children in these households inevitably bear the prospects of maintaining a vibrant Portuguese community in the GTA and I propose that actions by the community in ranking dialects influence mothers’ decisions about transmitting language and culture to their children.

Using eye-tracking to study anaphoric relations processing in European Portuguese

In this study we evaluate processing costs of different types of anaphoric expressions during reading. We consider three types of anaphoric expressions in Subject sentential position: a null pronoun (pro), and two gaps produced by syntactic movement: a WHvariable and a NP copy. Given that coreferential pro exhibits more referential weight than wh- and NP-gaps, and grounded on theories of referential processing based on relations of hierarchy and accessibility of the antecedent, we raise the hypothesis that the more dependent on its antecedent the anaphoric null constituent is, and the more minimal is the distance in terms of hierarchical structure between the anaphoric null element and its antecedent, the lower are the cognitive costs in processing. To test our hypothesis, we registered the eye movements with R6-HS ASL system of 20 Portuguese adult native speakers. Text regions including the selected anaphoric expressions were delimited and tagged. We analyzed the reading time of each region taking into account the number and duration of eye fixations per region; we used the reading time by character in milliseconds in order to compare values between regions of different length. We found a significant advantage in the reading time of the gaps arising from movement over the reading time of pro.

Improvements on the Porter`s Stemming Algorithm for Portuguese

The amount of textual information digitally stored is growing every day. However, our capability of processing and analyzing that information is not growing at the same pace. To overcome this limitation, it is important to develop semiautomatic processes to extract relevant knowledge from textual information, such as the text mining process. One of the main and most expensive stages of the text mining process is the text pre-processing stage, where the unstructured text should be transformed to structured format such as an attribute-value table. The stemming process, i.e. linguistics normalization, is usually used to find the attributes of this table. However, the stemming process is strongly dependent on the language in which the original textual information is given. Furthermore, for most languages, the stemming algorithms proposed in the literature are computationally expensive. In this work, several improvements of the well know Porter stemming algorithm for the Portuguese language, which explore the characteristics of this language, are proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm executes in far less time without affecting the quality of the generated stems.

Leadership of portuguese community schools in the East Coast of the United States and the public policies of education: a multiple case studies

The Portuguese community schools of the United States located in the areas of larger Portuguese population concentration are social organizations that come materializing throughout decades the designs of the educative policies of the Portuguese government in relation to the expansion and preservation of the language, the culture and the history of Portugal. These designs of the educative policies are enrolled in the Constitution of the Republic (1976), in the Basic Law of Educative System (1986) and, over all, in the successive legislative norms (Decree-laws and ordinances) of the successive governments. Portuguese community schools in the United States are structuralized in analogous way to schools of the Portuguese geographic space. For this qualitative study (multiple case), four directors of Portuguese schools of the East Coast of the United States were interviewed; two schools are in the state of Rhode Island and the other two are in the state of Massachusetts. Also, it was administered the questionnaire on practices of leadership “Leadership Practices Inventory” (LPI) of Kouzes and Posner (2002) to collect additional data about practices of leadership on the directors of the schools. The LPI evaluates practices of leadership classifying them in five domains: (a) Model the way; (b) Inspire a shared vision; (c) Challenge the process; (d) Enable others to act; and, (e) Encourage the heart. Results of this qualitative research indicate that the Portuguese Government has not had an educative policy stimulant, coherent and consistent of support, incentive, maintenance and diffusion of the Portuguese language and culture and the directors of the studied schools they have a proactive and serving leadership style in conducting the management of Portuguese community schools. The five practices of leadership are highly practiced by the directors of the studied schools above all the practices “Enable others to act” and “Encourage the heart”.

Aí marcador de especificidade de SN indefinidos: um estudo funcionalista com implicações para o ensino

This body of work aims to describe and analyze the behavior of the Aí specificity marker of indefinite Noun Phrases (NP), one of the many functions this linguistic item is developing in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. From the Functional Linguistic theory perspective, the North American declivity, this project intends to outline the possible grammaticalization trajectory taken by the Aí specificity marker. It will be followed from its function as a spatial deitic up to its integration of indefinite NP, and the action of the fundamental principles of the theory, such as iconicity and informativity, will be observed on the use of this item. Following this, Aí specificity marker behavior will be described in respect to various linguistic and social factors: type of text where the occurrence is encountered, language modality in which the latter is produced, syntactic function developed by the NP specified by Aí , the existence or lack of material intervening between Aí and the NP nuclear noun, informational status of the NP adjugated to Aí , and finally, sex, education and age of the speaker. The occurrence of conversational implicatures will also be verified (GRICE, 1982) within the contexts of Aí specificity marker use. Reflections on the teaching of grammar will be made, as well as on the possibility and validity of working with noun phrase specificity markers in elementary and high school Portuguese language classes. The data used in this research project stem from Corpus Discurso & Gramática A língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), and from Corpus Discurso & Gramática A língua falada e escrita na cidade do Rio de Janeiro (VOTRE; OLIVEIRA, 1995)

Conectores adversativos na fala do natalense: uma análise funcionalista com implicações para o ensino

This work analyzes the behavior of the adversative connectors in the speech of the user of Natal, with views to suggest implications for the grammar teaching in the high school Portuguese languages classes. It is an investigation that sits on the functionalist paradigm, specifically in the protected ideas for Givón. For so much, data of situations of speech from the corpus Discurso e gramática lingual falada e escrita da cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998). The sample embraces a total of forty interviews, of which the occurrences are cut out whose registrations mark the existence of adversatives constructions in narratives of personal experience and in the opinion reports, modality of oral language, of the mentioned database. The work revisits authors of the grammar, Cunha (1986); Bechara (2006); Perini (2006), among others; authors that contemplate referring approaches to the use of opposition connectors as: Barreto (1999); Tavares (2003); Longhin (2003); Silva (2005); Rocha (2006); Neves (2000, 2006). The results of the panoramic analysis reveal as adversity connectors in use for the habitant of Natal, for recurrence order, the mas, e, aí, agora, só que, no entanto and já. Analyzed the results, the same ones are compared with the treatment presented by the traditional grammar, with application of functional iconicity principle, markdness principle and the prototype of the category is chosen. In the differentiated analysis of the item " agora ", structural profile of the constructions is analyzed that involve the item, semantic profile, times, manners and aspects of the verbs that they wrap up in the constructions in reference, trajectory of grammaticalization and comparison with the prototype of the category. Finally, they are suggested implications of whole the study for the teaching of Portuguese language, in the high school classes

Estratégias de relativização no português brasileiro e implicações para o ensino: o caso das cortadoras

This work consists of a cognitive-functional approach of relativization strategies of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), this is, standard relatives (with preposition or without it) and non-standard relatives (copiadora and the deletion pattern), and it emphasizes the last one. We investigate the use of the relative construction strategies in spoken and written texts produced by speakers from different school levels in a specific situation: a face-to-face interviewing. Our database is the corpora Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal e a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. We contrast the use of the standard relative to the deletion pattern in prepositional context, by considering cognitive, social and interactional motivations for the use of the deletion pattern instead of the standard one. Our research leads us to verify that the deletion pattern is fixing as the preferred relativization strategy in prepositional contexts, and, in this way, it brings out a grammaticalization process in working. For this reason, we propose to take this relative construction as a common way to structure a relative clause, in the same way we take the standard pattern. Finally, we discuss the treatment of questions related to the processes of teaching and learning of Portuguese language and some suggestions are given in terms of class activities. We expect that the development of this research may give both support for the Portuguese teachers and suggestions to improve the teaching and learning process of Portuguese language, contributing in special to the treatment of the syntax of complex clauses.

Cross-cultural adaptation of the Portuguese version of the patient-generated subjective global assessment

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

Language policy in Brazil: Monolingualism and linguistic prejudice

The purpose of this article is to analyse the linguistic situation in Brazil and to discuss the relationship between Portuguese and the 200 other languages, about 170 indigenous, spoken in the country. It focuses on three points: the historical process of language unification, recent official language policy initiatives, and linguistic prejudice. I examine two manifestations of linguistic prejudice, one against external elements, and the other against supposedly inferior internal elements, pointing out to a common origin: the myth that the Portuguese language in Brazil is characterised by an astonishing unity. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Uma abordagem do funcionamento discursivo das construções adversativas sob a ótica da gramaticalização

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

Análise comparativa do processo de gramaticalização das perífrases conjuncionais agora que e já que

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Um estudo funcional da perífrase conjuncional 'Desde que' sob a ótica da gramaticalização

Pós-graduação em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa - FCLAR