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

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

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

Integração das estruturas de complementação oracional no português brasileiro

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Estudo do marcador gustar sob a ótica das operações predicativas e enunciativas: proposta reflexiva para o ensino de línguas

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Ordering of representational level adverbial modifiers in spoken Brazilian Portuguese

Supported by the Functional Discourse Grammar theoretical model, as proposed by Hengeveld (2005), this paper aims to show that the order of modifiers of the Representational Level in spoken Brazilian Portuguese is determined by scope relations according to the layers of property, state-of-affairs and propositional content. This kind of distribution indicates that, far from being free-ordered as suggested by traditional grammarians, modifiers have a preferred position determined by semantic relations that may be only changed for pragmatic and structural reasons.

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)

Cross-cultural adaptation of the Work Disability Diagnosis Interview (WoDDI) for the Brazilian context

The Work Disability Diagnosis Interview (WoDDI) is a structured interview guide developed by the University of Sherbrooke, Canada to help clinicians detect the most important work-related disability predictors and to identify one or more causes of prolonged absenteeism. This methodological study aims for the cross-cultural adaptation of the WoDDI for the Brazilian context. The method followed international guidelines for studies of this kind, including the following steps: initial translation, synthesis of translations, back translation, evaluation by an expert committee and testing of the penultimate version. These steps allowed obtaining conceptual, semantic, idiomatic, experiential and operational equivalences, in addition to content validity. The results showed that the translated WoDDI is adapted to the Brazilian context and can be used after training.

A Computational Model for Processing Lexical Information"

The group analysed some syntactic and phonological phenomena that presuppose the existence of interrelated components within the lexicon, which motivate the assumption that there are some sublexicons within the global lexicon of a speaker. This result is confirmed by experimental findings in neurolinguistics. Hungarian speaking agrammatic aphasics were tested in several ways, the results showing that the sublexicon of closed-class lexical items provides a highly automated complex device for processing surface sentence structure. Analysing Hungarian ellipsis data from a semantic-syntactic aspect, the group established that the lexicon is best conceived of being as split into at least two main sublexicons: the store of semantic-syntactic feature bundles and a separate store of sound forms. On this basis they proposed a format for representing open-class lexical items whose meanings are connected via certain semantic relations. They also proposed a new classification of verbs to account for the contribution of the aspectual reading of the sentence depending on the referential type of the argument, and a new account of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of aspectual prefixes. The partitioned sets of lexical items are sublexicons on phonological grounds. These sublexicons differ in terms of phonotactic grammaticality. The degrees of phonotactic grammaticality are tied up with the problem of psychological reality, of how many degrees of this native speakers are sensitive to. The group developed a hierarchical construction network as an extension of the original General Inheritance Network formalism and this framework was then used as a platform for the implementation of the grammar fragments.

Associative processing and paranormal belief

In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originality and speed of individual associations. This 'BAG' (Bridge-the-Associative-Gap) task was used to investigate the relationships between creativity and paranormal belief. Twelve strong 'believers' and 12 strong 'skeptics' in paranormal phenomena were selected from a large student population (n > 350). Subjects were asked to produce single-word associations to word pairs. In 40 trials the two stimulus words were semantically indirectly related and in 40 other trials the words were semantically unrelated. Separately for these two stimulus types, response commonalities and association latencies were calculated. The main finding was that for unrelated stimuli, believers produced associations that were more original (had a lower frequency of occurrence in the group as a whole) than those of the skeptics. For the interpretation of the result we propose a model of association behavior that captures both 'positive' psychological aspects (i.e., verbal creativity) and 'negative' aspects (susceptibility to unfounded inferences), and outline its relevance for psychiatry. This model suggests that believers adopt a looser response criterion than skeptics when confronted with 'semantic noise'. Such a signal detection view of the presence/absence of judgments for loose semantic relations may help to elucidate the commonalities between creative thinking, paranormal belief and delusional ideation.

Hippocampus is place of interaction between unconscious and conscious memories retrieval

Recent experiments suggest that humans can form and later retrieve new semantic relations unconsciously by way of hippocampus - the key structure thought to support conscious relational (episodic) memory. Given that the hippocampus subserves both conscious and unconscious relational encoding/retrieval, we expected the hippocampus to be place of unconscious-conscious interactions. This hypothesis was tested in an fMRI experiment on the interaction between the unconscious retrieval of face-associated occupations and the subsequent conscious retrieval of celebrities’ occupations. For subliminal encoding, masked combinations of an unfamiliar face and a written occupation (“actor” or “politician”) were subliminally presented. At test, we presented the former subliminal faces again, without occupations and masks, as conscious retrieval cues. We hypothesized that faces would trigger the unconscious reactivation of the associated occupation - actor or politician -, which in turn would facilitate or inhibit the subsequent conscious recollection of a celebrity’s occupation. Following the presentation of a former subliminal face, we presented the portrait of a celebrity that participants were required to sort according to “actor” or “politician”. Depending on whether the triggered unconscious occupation was congruent or incongruent with the celebrity’s occupation, we expected an expedited or retarded conscious retrieval process as reflected in reaction times. Conscious retrieval was expedited in the congruent condition, but there was no effect in the incongruent condition. fMRI data collected during subliminal relational encoding confirmed that the hippocampus was interacting with neocortical semantic storage sites. fMRI data collected at test indicated that the facilitated conscious retrieval of celebrity-associated occupations was related to deactivations in this same network spanning hippocampus and neocortical semantic storage sites. Hence, unconscious retrieval likely preactivated this network, which allowed for a sparing recruitment of additional neural resources to assist conscious retrieval. This finding supports the notion that consciously and unconsciously acquired relational memories are stored in a single, cohesive hippocampal-neocortical memory space.

Against Logically Possible World-Relativized Existence

The thesis that entities exist in, at, or in relation to logically possible worlds is criticized. The suggestion that actually nonexistent fictional characters might nevertheless exist in nonactual merely logically possible worlds runs afoul of the most general transworld identity requirements. An influential philosophical argument for the concept of world-relativized existence is examined in Alvin Plantinga’s formal development and explanation of modal semantic relations. Despite proposing an attractive unified semantics of alethic modality, Plantinga’s argument is rejected on formal grounds as supporting materially false actual existence assertions in the case of actually nonexistent objects in the framework of Plantinga’s own underlying classical predicate-quantificational logic.

Hippocampus Is Place of Interaction between Unconscious and Conscious Memories.

Recent evidence suggests that humans can form and later retrieve new semantic relations unconsciously by way of hippocampus-the key structure also recruited for conscious relational (episodic) memory. If the hippocampus subserves both conscious and unconscious relational encoding/retrieval, one would expect the hippocampus to be place of unconscious-conscious interactions during memory retrieval. We tested this hypothesis in an fMRI experiment probing the interaction between the unconscious and conscious retrieval of face-associated information. For the establishment of unconscious relational memories, we presented subliminal (masked) combinations of unfamiliar faces and written occupations ("actor" or "politician"). At test, we presented the former subliminal faces, but now supraliminally, as cues for the reactivation of the unconsciously associated occupations. We hypothesized that unconscious reactivation of the associated occupation-actor or politician-would facilitate or inhibit the subsequent conscious retrieval of a celebrity's occupation, which was also actor or politician. Depending on whether the reactivated unconscious occupation was congruent or incongruent to the celebrity's occupation, we expected either quicker or delayed conscious retrieval process. Conscious retrieval was quicker in the congruent relative to a neutral baseline condition but not delayed in the incongruent condition. fMRI data collected during subliminal face-occupation encoding confirmed previous evidence that the hippocampus was interacting with neocortical storage sites of semantic knowledge to support relational encoding. fMRI data collected at test revealed that the facilitated conscious retrieval was paralleled by deactivations in the hippocampus and neocortical storage sites of semantic knowledge. We assume that the unconscious reactivation has pre-activated overlapping relational representations in the hippocampus reducing the neural effort for conscious retrieval. This finding supports the notion of synergistic interactions between conscious and unconscious relational memories in a common, cohesive hippocampal-neocortical memory space.

Characterising emergent semantics in Twitter lists

Twitter lists organise Twitter users into multiple, often overlapping, sets. We believe that these lists capture some form of emergent semantics, which may be useful to characterise. In this paper we describe an approach for such characterisation, which consists of deriving semantic relations between lists and users by analyzing the cooccurrence of keywords in list names. We use the vector space model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to obtain similar keywords according to co-occurrence patterns. These results are then compared to similarity measures relying on WordNet and to existing Linked Data sets. Results show that co-occurrence of keywords based on members of the lists produce more synonyms and more correlated results to that of WordNet similarity measures.

Descubrimiento de mappings en recursos geoespaciales

La integración de fuentes de información heterogéneas ha sido un problema abordado en diferentes tipos de fuentes a lo largo de las décadas de diferentes maneras. Una de ellas es el establecimiento de unas relaciones semánticas que permitan poder unir la información de las fuentes relacionadas. A estos enlaces, claves en la integración, se les ha llamado generalmente mappings. Los mappings se han usado en multitud de trabajos y se han abordado, de manera más práctica que teórica en muchos casos, diferentes soluciones para su descubrimiento, su almacenaje, su explotación, etc. Sin embargo, aunque han sido muchas las contribuciones sobre mappings, no hay una definición generalizada y admitida por la comunidad que cubra todos los aspectos vinculados a los mappings. Además, en su proceso de descubrimiento, no existe un marco teórico que defina metódicamente los procesos a seguir y sus características. Igualmente, la actual forma de evaluar el descubrimiento de mappings no es suficiente para toda la casuística existente. En este trabajo se aporta una definición de mapping génerica que engloba todos los sistemas actuales, la especificación detallada del proceso de descubrimiento y el análisis y la propuesta de un proceso de evaluación del descubrimiento. La validez de estos aportes se comprueba con la formulación de hipótesis y su comprobación mediante un estudio cuantitativo sobre un caso de uso con recursos geoespaciales heterogéneos. ABSTRACT The integration of heterogeneous information resources has been an issue addressed in different types of sources over the decades in different ways. One of them is the establishment of semantic relations which allow information from different related resources to be linked. These links, crucial pieces of this integration, are usually known as mappings. These mappings have been widely used in many applications, and different solutions for their discovery, storing, explotation, etc. have been presented, following rather a more practical than theoretical way in many cases. However, although mappings have been widely applied by many researchers, there is a lack of a generally accepted definition that can cover all the aspects related to mappings. Moreover, in the process of mapping discovery, there is not a theoretical framework that defines methodically the processes to be followed and their characteristics. Similarly, the current way of assessing or evaluating the discovery of mappings is insufficient for all the existing use cases. The main contributions of this work are threefold. On the one hand, it presents a general definition of "mapping" which covers all current systems. On the other hand, it describes a detailed specification of the discovery process, and, finally, it faces the analysis and the purpose of the evaluation of this discovery process. The validity of these contributions has been checked with the formulation of hypothesis which have been verified by using heterogeneous geospatial resources in a quantitative study.

An approach based on Logic Forms and WordNet relationships to Textual Entailment performance

This paper outlines the approach adopted by the PLSI research group at University of Alicante in the PASCAL-2006 second Recognising Textual Entailment challenge. Our system is composed of several components. On the one hand, the first component performs the derivation of the logic forms of the text/hypothesis pairs and, on the other hand, the second component provides us with a similarity score given by the semantic relations between the derived logic forms. In order to obtain this score we apply several measures of similitude and relatedness based on the structure and content of WordNet.