Desempenho de pré-escolares com queixa de Distúrbios da Comunicação no Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (Plai-2)

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

Desempenho de pré-escolares com queixa de Distúrbios da Comunicação no Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (Plai-2)

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

Contextual Reading and Metalinguistic Processing in Brazilian Portuguese: A Longitudinal Study

Metalinguistic skill is the ability to reflect upon language as an object of thought. Amongst metalinguistic skills, two seem to be associated with reading and spelling: morphological awareness and phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability of reflecting upon the phonemes that compose words, and morphological awareness is the ability of reflecting upon the morphemes that compose the words. The latter seems to be particularly important for reading comprehension and contextual reading, as beyond phonological information, syntactic and semantic information are required. This study is set to investigate - with a longitudinal design - the relation between those abilities and contextual reading measured by the Cloze test. The first part of the study explores the relationship between morphological awareness tasks and Cloze scores through simple correlations and, in the second part, the specificity of such relationship was inquired using multiple regressions. The results give some support to the hypothesis that morphological awareness offers an independent contribution regarding phonological awareness to contextual reading in Brazilian Portuguese.

Exchange of disfluency with age from function to content words in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter

The purpose of this study was to investigate the exchange of disfluencies from function words to content words with age in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter. Ninety stuttering individuals and 90 controls, native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were divided into three age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The study method involved analyzing the occurrence of stuttering on content and function words based on spontaneous speech samples. Results indicated that children tend to be more disfluent on function words. With the increase in age, teenagers and adults who stutter presented a higher number of disfluencies on content words. These findings support the current literature, indicating that with the aging process, there is an exchange of disfluencies from function to content words. This shift in the disfluency pattern may account for a more advanced type of stuttering. The study also demonstrated that disfluencies in Portuguese speakers follow the same pattern of shifting from function to content words with age as for English speakers.

Storage as a way to grammaticalization

This paper explores the possible contribution of various types of storage to grammaticalization processes, and the description of such processes by means of Construction Grammar(s) (CxG). The grammaticalization processes of French pas and certain complex adpositions in German and Finnish serve to illustrate that storage can background the literal meaning of elements like pas, thus enabling the constructions containing them to grammaticalize. A further form of storage, the emergence of a productive template on the basis of high type frequency, may in turn stand behind their grammaticalization. Two further assumptions about language use are also exploited in the explanation of grammaticalization: the possibility of processing complex units holistically and a human urge to interpret recurring forms as signs.

PoS-tagging the Web in Portuguese. National varieties, text typologies and spelling systems

The great amount of text produced every day in the Web turned it as one of the main sources for obtaining linguistic corpora, that are further analyzed with Natural Language Processing techniques. On a global scale, languages such as Portuguese - official in 9 countries - appear on the Web in several varieties, with lexical, morphological and syntactic (among others) differences. Besides, a unified spelling system for Portuguese has been recently approved, and its implementation process has already started in some countries. However, it will last several years, so different varieties and spelling systems coexist. Since PoS-taggers for Portuguese are specifically built for a particular variety, this work analyzes different training corpora and lexica combinations aimed at building a model with high-precision annotation in several varieties and spelling systems of this language. Moreover, this paper presents different dictionaries of the new orthography (Spelling Agreement) as well as a new freely available testing corpus, containing different varieties and textual typologies.

Semantic change and intersubjectification: The origin of reprise evidential conditional in Old Catalan

The reprise evidential conditional (REC) is nowadays not very usual in Catalan: it is restricted to journalistic language and to some very formal genres (such as academic or legal language), it is not present in spontaneous discourse. On the one hand, it has been described among the rather new modality values of the conditional. On the other, the normative tradition tended to reject it for being a gallicism, or to describe it as an unsuitable neologism. Thanks to the extraction from text corpora, we surprisingly find this REC in Catalan from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the contemporary age, with semantic and pragmatic nuances and different evidence of grammaticalization. Due to the current interest in evidentiality, the REC has been widely studied in French, Italian and Portuguese, focusing mainly on its contemporary uses and not so intensively on the diachronic process that could explain the origin of this value. In line with this research, that we initiated studying the epistemic and evidential future in Catalan, our aim is to describe: a) the pragmatic context that could have been the initial point of the REC in the thirteenth century, before we find indisputable attestations of this use; b) the path of semantic change followed by the conditional from a ‘future in the past’ tense to the acquisition of epistemic and evidential values; and c) the role played by invited inferences, subjectification and intersubjectification in this change.

Embracing english as a lingua franca : learning from portuguese users of english in higher education

Tese de doutoramento, Linguística (Linguística Aplicada), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2016

Taboo Language and Illness Online: The Use of Specific Emoticons and Graphic Signs to Talk about HIV/AIDS in South Africa

South Africa is one of the countries most affected by HIV/AIDS: According to 2014 UNAIDS data 6.8 million South Africans live with HIV/AIDS, which means a 18.9% prevalence rate among adults (15-49 years old). Despite this strong presence of HIV/AIDS in South African society it remains relatively stigmatized and is not openly talked about. The silence about HIV/AIDS maintained in everyday conversations and the superstitions associated with this illness have led to the creation of a taboo language. This study aims at shedding light on how South African users resort to specific emoticons and graphic signs to talk about HIV/AIDS online. For this purpose 368 Facebook status updates and comments concerning HIV/AIDS and its side effects were analysed. All participants, aged 14-48, lived at the moment of data collection in Cape Town, in the Cape Flats area. The online conversations investigated are mainly in English mixed with Afrikaans and/or Xhosa. The emoticons and graphic signs in most cases display a graphic depiction of the physical (and mental) effects of the illness. These linguistic and semiotic practices employed on Facebook provide insight into how Capetonian users, on the one hand, express solidarity and sympathy with people suffering from HIV/AIDS. On the other hand, the emoticons and graphic signs are used to label and position people affected by HIV/AIDS. Thus, in the South African context social network sites have become an important space and means for communicating HIV/AIDS issues.

A dictionary of Spanish and Spanish-American mining, metallurgical and allied terms, to whichs some Porutguese and Portuguese-American (Brazilian) terms are added,

"List of principal works consulted": p. vii-[ix]

Immigrant high school students' in-depth understandings of the value of heritage language and bilingualism

The purpose of this research was to explore perceptions among 9 th through 12th grade students from Brazil, Haiti and Jamaica, with respect to their heritage languages: Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Jamaican Patois. An additional purpose was to understand in greater detail possible variations of perception with respect to heritage language maintenance (or loss) in relation to one’s gender, first language, and place of birth. The research implemented semi-structured interviews with male and female adolescents with these heritage language backgrounds. Participants’ responses were recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were analyzed via a categorizing of themes emerging from the data. Data were analyzed using inductive analysis. Three categories emerged from the inductive analysis of the data: (a) heritage language, (b) bilingualism, and (c) English as a second language. The analysis reveals that as participants learn English, they continue to value their heritage language and feel positively toward bilingualism, but differ in their preference regarding use of native language and English in a variety of contexts. There seems to be a mismatch between a positive attitude and an interest in learning their heritage language. Families and teachers, as agents, may not be helping students fully understand the advantages of bilingualism. Students seem to have a lack of understanding of bilingualism’s cognitive and bi-literacy benefits. Instead, employment seems to be perceived as the number one reason for becoming bilingual. Also, the students have a desire to add culture to the heritage language curriculum. The study was conducted at one of the most diverse and largest high schools in Palm Beach, in Palm Beach County, Florida. The results of this study imply that given the positive attitude toward heritage language and bilingualism, students need to be guided in exploring their understanding of heritage language and bilingualism. Implications for teaching and learning, as well as recommendations for further research, are included.

Semantic Categorization in Portuguese-English Bilinguals

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the cross-linguistic interactions in the semantic categorization of late Portuguese-English bilinguals. The lexical items used in this study have a wider range of applications in one language and narrower in the other. Three types of categories were examined: classical, homophones, and radials. Late Portuguese-English bilinguals, as well as Portuguese and English monolinguals, were tested. After hearing a word, participants were asked to choose from a set of images, one that could be labelled as such. Analyses showed that when tested in English, participants performed better when it was the wider language. Participants’ performance was lower on classical categories than on homophone and radial categories.