Geo-morfo-evolução de Setúbal e Évora: paralelismos e diversidades

Resumo As cidades apresentam no seu desenvolvimento características comuns, embora em cada uma se verifique uma entidade intrínseca e determinada por vários fatores, nomeadamente a morfologia e o desenho urbano. Estes são influenciados pelo processo de instalação da cidade, numa determinada época, com uma posição específica no território funcional e num sítio com características topográficas e geográficas, que irão informar a criação das várias dimensões da configuração urbana; económicas; funcionais; sociológicas; estéticas e simbólicos. Temos, assim, cidades com os seus elementos estruturantes distintos: ruas; praças; quarteirões, equipamentos; edifícios singulares e a arquitetura de caracter corrente, que as distinguem. Analisemos o exemplo das cidades de Setúbal e Évora sob estes aspetos e as suas diferentes configurações morfológicas. A cidade de Setúbal instalou-se numa local que lhe assegurou boas condições naturais de defesa, boa exposição solar, proteção dos ventos, facilidade de recursos económicos assentes nas actividades fluvio-marítimos, condições geográficas de comunicação quer por via terrestre, quer por via fluvial e marítima, através do Oceano Atlântico. A urbe, que beneficiou de grande desenvolvimento no período de ocupação romana, terá sofrido, posteriormente, um período de decadência, tendo sido reocupada com a reconquista cristã. A área urbana inicial foi cercada, no séc. XIV, por uma cintura de muralhas. No séc. XVII a construção da segunda estrutura defensiva, abaluartada, circunscreveu também os arrabaldes e conteve a consolidação urbana até ao final ao séc. XIX. Évora é uma urbe que, remontando a data indeterminada, conserva ainda hoje o seu centro histórico circunscrito por um conjunto notável de muralhas cuja construção remonta à Baixa Idade Média. O desenvolvimento da cidade ocorreu a partir dos eixos que ligavam as principais portas situadas no circuito amuralhado quer o mais antigo que remontava ao período romano-godo quer o seguinte da época medieva, ou o mais recente, o Sistema Vauban do século XVII. O tecido urbano foi-se densificando ao longo dos séculos constatando-se actualmente a existência de espaços urbanos livres no casco histórico de tipologias diversas. No caso de Setúbal o tecido urbano foi sendo formado, com uma forma alongada, sob a orientação de eixos paralelos à linha de costa e o surgimento progressivo de praças, segundo um crescimento orgânico, embora submetido a uma estrutura que seguiu em cada momento os parâmetros organizacionais definidores e geradores da forma urbana. A cidade de Évora teve um desenvolvimento radio-concêntrico que evoluiu prolongando os eixos radiais, interligados através de vias circulares.

Self-care in Patients with Heart Failure

Objectives: To adapt for the Portuguese language the Self-Care of Heart Failure Index V6.2, analyse the self-care in maintenance, management skills and self-confidence of patients with heart failure who attend the nursing consultation of two Hospitals. Method: Explo- ratory study, sample 110 patients who frequented the nursing consultation for patients with heart failure of two Portuguese hospitals, conducted in the period of 6 months. He appea- led to the descriptive statistics and psychometric tests. Results: Internal consistency similar to the original scale. Mostly elderly, low literacy patients in self-care, low values associated with physical activity to the control of salt in meals taken away from home and inadequate control of signs and symptoms. Conclusion: Patients’ present difficulties in maintenance and management of the disease are self-confident face anyway. This instrument allows for individualized assessment leading to decision-making and action adjusted.

Phonological and articulation treatment approaches in Portuguese children with speech and language impairments: a randomized controlled intervention study

Background: In Portugal, the routine clinical practice of speech and language therapists (SLTs) in treating children with all types of speech sound disorder (SSD) continues to be articulation therapy (AT). There is limited use of phonological therapy (PT) or phonological awareness training in Portugal. Additionally, at an international level there is a focus on collecting information on and differentiating between the effectiveness of PT and AT for children with different types of phonologically based SSD, as well as on the role of phonological awareness in remediating SSD. It is important to collect more evidence for the most effective and efficient type of intervention approach for different SSDs and for these data to be collected from diverse linguistic and cultural perspectives. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of a PT and AT approach for treatment of 14 Portuguese children, aged 4.0–6.7 years, with a phonologically based SSD. Methods & Procedures: The children were randomly assigned to one of the two treatment approaches (seven children in each group). All children were treated by the same SLT, blind to the aims of the study, over three blocks of a total of 25 weekly sessions of intervention. Outcome measures of phonological ability (percentage of consonants correct (PCC), percentage occurrence of different phonological processes and phonetic inventory) were taken before and after intervention. A qualitative assessment of intervention effectiveness from the perspective of the parents of participants was included. Outcomes & Results: Both treatments were effective in improving the participants’ speech, with the children receiving PT showing a more significant improvement in PCC score than those receiving the AT. Children in the PT group also showed greater generalization to untreated words than those receiving AT. Parents reported both intervention approaches to be as effective in improving their children’s speech. Conclusions & Implications: The PT (combination of expressive phonological tasks, phonological awareness, listening and discrimination activities) proved to be an effective integrated method of improving phonological SSD in children. These findings provide some evidence for Portuguese SLTs to employ PT with children with phonologically based SSD

Heritage speaker competence differences, language change and input type: inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese

It has been argued that colloquial dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have undergone significant linguistic change resulting in the loss of inflected infinitives (e.g., Pires, 2002, 2006). Since BP adults, at least educated ones, have complete knowledge of inflected infinitives, the implicit claim is that they are transmitted via formal education in the standard dialect. In the present article, I test one of the latent predictions of such claims; namely, the fact that heritage speakers of BP who lack formal education in the standard dialect should never develop native-like knowledge of inflected infinitives. In doing so, I highlight two significant implications (a) that heritage speaker grammars are a good source for testing dialectal variation and language change proposals and (b) incomplete acquisition and/or attrition are not the only sources of heritage language competence differences. Employing the syntactic and semantic tests of Rothman and Iverson (2007), I compare heritage speakers' knowledge to Rothman and Iverson's advanced adult L2 learners and educated native controls. Unlike the latter groups, the data for heritage speakers indicate that they do not have target knowledge of inflected infinitives, lending support to Pires' claims, suggesting that literacy plays a significant role in the acquisition of this grammatical property in BP.

English-Spanish bilingual learners of Portuguese as a third language: non-redundant acquisition and its typological nature

This chapter has two goals: (a) to discuss the Spanish-Portuguese interface in current formal language acquisition research and (b) to highlight the contributions of this language pairing in the emerging field of formal third language acquisition. The authors discuss two L3 acquisition studies (Montrul, Dias, & Santos, 2011; Giancaspro, Halloran, & Iverson, in press) examining Differential Object Marking, a morphological case marker present in Spanish but not in Portuguese, arguing that the results show how data from Spanish-English bilinguals learning Brazilian Portuguese as an L3 illuminate the deterministic role of structural and typological similarity in linguistic transfer. The data provide supportive evidence for only one of three existing L3 transfer models: the Typological Proximity Model (Rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013).

GRAMMAR and COMMUNICATION IN PORTUGUESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE A Study in the Context of Teletandem Interactions

This paper presents a study about the role of grammar in on-line interactions conducted in Portuguese and in English, between Brazilian and English-speaking interactants, with the aim of teaching Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL). The interactions occurred by means of chat and the MSN Messenger, and generated audio and video data for language analysis. Grammar is dealt with from two perspectives, an inductive and a deductive approach, so as to investigate the relevance of systematization of grammar rules in the process of learning PFL in teletandem interactions.

Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, second edition, in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

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