The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts

Abstract. In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyllabic words. When making curriculums for second language learners, teachers are helped by knowing which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech and there are some structural and anecdotal evidence that word stress should play a more important role for intelligibility of Swedish, than the tonal word accent. The Swedish word stress is about prominence contrasts between syllables, mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the tonal word accent is signaled mainly by pitch contour. The word stress contrast, as in armen [´arːmən] ‘the arm’ - armén [ar´meːn] ‘the army’, the first word trochaic and the second iambic, is present in all regional varieties of Swedish, and realized with roughly the same acoustic cues, while the tonal word accent, as in anden [´anːdən] ‘the duck’ - anden [`anːdən] ‘the spirit’ is absent in some dialects (as well as in singing), and also signaled with a variety of tonal patterns depending on region. The present study aims at comparing the respective perceptual weight of the two mentioned contrasts. Two lexical decision tests were carried out where in total 34 native Swedish listeners should decide whether a stimulus was a real word or a non-word. Real words of all mentioned categories were mixed with nonsense words and words that were mispronounced with opposite stress pattern or opposite tonal word accent category. The results show that distorted word stress caused more non-word judgments and more loss, than distorted word accent. Our conclusion is that intelligibility of Swedish is more sensitive to distorted word stress pattern than to distorted tonal word accent pattern. This is in compliance with the structural arguments presented above, and also with our own intuition.

Intimacy and making : thinking constellations of consciousness and the movements of invention

This paper takes up the three terms - creativity, consciousness and intimacy - and positions them as possible ‘ultimate terms’. Inquiring into the use of these terms to garner approval, status or power within cultural contexts, the paper attempts to unpack them, and simultaneously to seek out any structural similarities in the ways that they operate. The term ‘creativity’ is deconstructed via a Derridean framework, wherein ‘inventiveness’ is posited as a more rigorous alternative in most cases. Consciousness is read closely in relation to its association with notions of awareness and ‘enlightenment’. And ‘intimacy’ is playfully explored as an alternative term for enlightenment, a manoeuvre which brings to the fore some structural assumptions about that which intimacy might comprise. The assumption of intimacy as a spatially-dependent notion is also interrogated. The paper contends that intimacy may involve an unsettling of spatial assumptions proper, and therefore not be simply a function of closeness or distance. It draws on Serres’ notion of the angel as messenger and as analogy for the preposition, indicator of position, but occupant of none. Finally an example from art practice is offered, one that arguably performs the terms intimacy and creativity at once: an epistolary adventure in poetry and photographs, called The Post Project.

Um olhar sociológico sobre a criança e o brincar: espaço e tempo de construção, reinvenção e aprendizagem

This research I discuss the play, also talking with the other subjects that make up the universe in which the play is inserted, such as family, school and culture. The fundamental proposition of this dissertation assumes that the absence of play in children's lives affect their physical structure, psychological, biological, cultural, social, historical and theirs development. The initial questions were: What are the spacetimes reserved in the school for play? What is the importance of play in the development of children? Does the school recognize the importance of play in its social space? How the children perceive and use the spacetimes to play at school? Are there spacetimes at school to play? This is a theoretical and empirical research of exploratory study. The research‟s field was the Municipal School Professor Ulysses Góes, located in district of Nova Descoberta, in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte and, as research techniques, I used: participant observation, photography, structured interviews with students and questionnaires with teachers. The results indicate that for most of children, the school allows the play, few disagree with this preposition.Teachers recognize the importance of play in school, but for various reasons do not provide your practice. The dissertation points the possibility of new studies and developments for the theme.

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.

As peças didáticas de Bertolt Brecht e o processo de alfabetização

Pós-graduação em Educação - IBRC

Construção exploratória de uma prepnet para o português do Brasil: uma incursão linguistico-computacional no universo das preposições indicativas de espaço

Pós-graduação em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa - FCLAR

A preposição para e o processo de contrução referencial

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

Estudo diacrônico do uso das preposições: documentos latino-portugueses e português paulista moderno

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Estrutura morfológica das formas futuras nas cantigas de Santa Maria

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Variação e gramaticalização no uso de preposições em contextos de verbos de movimento no português brasileiro

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

Variação e gênero textual: o uso das preposições nas cartas de leitoras brasileiras e portuguesas

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Um estudo sintático-semântico das preposições em complementos verbais de webjornais paulistas

The main goal of this work is to evaluate the realization of the linguistic phenomenon of preposition and also to investigate how current normative pressures influence the production and the perception of processes of variation and change in Brazilian Portuguese. We analyze the use of prepositions a and para in verbal complementation contexts in contemporary journalistic texts from São Paulo’s press – the web newspapers. The contexts considered are constructions with complements of direction, movement with transference, material transference, and verbal/perceptual predicators (Berlinck, 1996; Corrêa, Cançado, 2006). Because written texts tend to be more conservative (i.e. more normative) this research provides an important linguistic investigation that contributes to the sociolinguistic knowledge of the language. However, the newspapers also tend to reflect the use, so they constitute a privileged place for us to understand the conflicting relationship between ‘norm’ and ‘use’. Besides this, the research is relevant for General Linguistics for considering linguistic and extralinguistic factors which determine the use and frequency of the prepositions, like syntactic-semantic relations between the preposition, the verb, the complement, and the text genre. We collected data from web newspapers from Araraquara, with small and medium circulation. Based on previous results, we have ascertained the predominance of the use of the preposition a in the newspapers from São Paulo in the 20th century. However, we have also ascertained representative records of variation... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

Preposições em textos do gênero notícia na imprensa paulista: norma e uso no ínicio do século XX

This paper proposes a reflection on processes of variation and change that occurred with the portuguese prepositions a, ate, em and para, taken as a parameter for answers in a broader context, the confrontation between the norm and use and between standard and linguistic variation. We conducted the study based on a corpus composed of all occurrences of the prepositions in question removed news of the newspaper O Combate and O Estado de Sao Paulo. Whereas the main objective of the study is to present and describe the use of these particles in newspaper articles of the Imprensa Paulista, data were collected and quantified by using the statistical package GOLDVARB, and interpretation of results relied (i) assumptions regarding the process variation in the use of prepositions and prepositions replace weak, as the preposition to, for strong prepositions (para, em, até), (ii) in comparison with the grammatical rule in effect at the time, (iii) and in the search for the existence of some historical factor that justifies the selection of a preposition rather than another. Among the hypotheses, we investigate the relationship between these prepositions and whose kind of preachers they introduce supplements: the direction of motion (abstract or concrete) or transfer (material and verbal / perceptual). This theoretical perspective was the Labovian sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972, 1994), which defines the linguistic variable as a representation of two or more different ways to convey a certain information content, being necessary to define it the following criteria set exact number of variants to establish all the multiplicity of contexts in which it appears; develop a quantitative index for measuring the values of variables

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.