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.

Computational linguistic systematization of a lexicon from the ibitinga embroidery industry conceptual domain

This work discusses a proposition for organizing the lexical items from the conceptual domain labeled THE EMBROIDERY INDUSTRY OF IBITINGA in terms of a natural ontology. It also aims to establish the alignment between this ontology and the bases WordNet.Pr and WordNet.Br. © 2009 IEEE.

Fly your kite: a metaphor for a theory of territorial development

Includes bibliography

A gramaticalização da conjunção concessiva embora

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

O papel da metáfora/analogia no ensino de ciências: uma abordagem semiótica

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

A metáfora e a sua representação em sistemas de processamento automático de línguas naturais

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Construções de sentido de um grupo de falantes da região de Patrocínio-MG: um estudo sobre o cômico e o ambíguo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Acordo, reflexão e filosofia - uma análise a partir de Wittgenstein

Within the Wittgensteinian approach, the ideal of exactness, disconnected from concrete situations of language use, does not make any sense. Such an approach takes into account every and any kind of intersubjective communication, inasmuch as it is based on a previous agreement concerning the use of language and the interpretation of the world linked to it. This paper, throughout its three parts, seeks to understand this agreement, and evaluates whether or not philosophy plays a role in relation to it. To start with, the obstacles to such an agreement will be considered, namely, solipsism and private, subjective language. In the following stage, the intention is to indicate that the rupture from the subjectivist conception of language allows Wittgenstein to visualize another subject, the one incorporated by the community. From then on, the question is to verify whether reflectivity is possible in the ambit of a linguistic community or not, since the objectivity of concepts is not sought within knowledge, but within forms of life. In the third and last part, we will point to the language game metaphor correlative to the meaning emerging from the flow of life, of thought, and of culture and see how philosophy can represent a significant activity in the search for understanding that flow.

Estudo contrastivo das emoções em expressões idiomáticas corporais do italiano e do português brasileiro: uma vertente cognitivista

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

Brazilian portuguese wordNet: a computational linguistic exercise of encoding bilingual relational lexicons

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

A tradução de expressões idiomáticas de baixa dedutibilidade metafórica: contribuições aos estudos fraseológicos bilíngues

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

Fuzzy linguistic model for bioelectrical impedance vector analysis

Backgrounds Ea aims: The boundaries between the categories of body composition provided by vectorial analysis of bioimpedance are not well defined. In this paper, fuzzy sets theory was used for modeling such uncertainty. Methods: An Italian database with 179 cases 18-70 years was divided randomly into developing (n = 20) and testing samples (n = 159). From the 159 registries of the testing sample, 99 contributed with unequivocal diagnosis. Resistance/height and reactance/height were the input variables in the model. Output variables were the seven categories of body composition of vectorial analysis. For each case the linguistic model estimated the membership degree of each impedance category. To compare such results to the previously established diagnoses Kappa statistics was used. This demanded singling out one among the output set of seven categories of membership degrees. This procedure (defuzzification rule) established that the category with the highest membership degree should be the most likely category for the case. Results: The fuzzy model showed a good fit to the development sample. Excellent agreement was achieved between the defuzzified impedance diagnoses and the clinical diagnoses in the testing sample (Kappa = 0.85, p < 0.001). Conclusions: fuzzy linguistic model was found in good agreement with clinical diagnoses. If the whole model output is considered, information on to which extent each BIVA category is present does better advise clinical practice with an enlarged nosological framework and diverse therapeutic strategies. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd and European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism. All rights reserved.

CONTEXT TREE SELECTION AND LINGUISTIC RHYTHM RETRIEVAL FROM WRITTEN TEXTS

The starting point of this article is the question "How to retrieve fingerprints of rhythm in written texts?" We address this problem in the case of Brazilian and European Portuguese. These two dialects of Modern Portuguese share the same lexicon and most of the sentences they produce are superficially identical. Yet they are conjectured, on linguistic grounds, to implement different rhythms. We show that this linguistic question can be formulated as a problem of model selection in the class of variable length Markov chains. To carry on this approach, we compare texts from European and Brazilian Portuguese. These texts are previously encoded according to some basic rhythmic features of the sentences which can be automatically retrieved. This is an entirely new approach from the linguistic point of view. Our statistical contribution is the introduction of the smallest maximizer criterion which is a constant free procedure for model selection. As a by-product, this provides a solution for the problem of optimal choice of the penalty constant when using the BIC to select a variable length Markov chain. Besides proving the consistency of the smallest maximizer criterion when the sample size diverges, we also make a simulation study comparing our approach with both the standard BIC selection and the Peres-Shields order estimation. Applied to the linguistic sample constituted for our case study, the smallest maximizer criterion assigns different context-tree models to the two dialects of Portuguese. The features of the selected models are compatible with current conjectures discussed in the linguistic literature.