Explorando operações discursivas na leitura de um artigo científico do campo da educação matemática: contributos para a reflexão sobre produção de conhecimento

Neste trabalho, proponho-me a estudar o funcionamento de algumas operações discursivas presentes em um artigo científico do campo da Educação Matemática, de modo a viabilizar uma leitura crítica do conhecimento ali apresentado. Para tanto, mobilizo categorias de análise provenientes de três vertentes teóricas distintas: a Semântica Linguística, com as noções de posto, pressuposto e subentendido, estudadas por Oswald Ducrot; a Linguística Textual, com as noções de referenciação e avaliatividade, abordadas por Paulo Roberto Gonçalves Segundo; e a Metaforologia, com as noções de Metáfora Situada e Conceptual, trabalhadas por George Lakoff, Mark Johnson e Solange C. Vereza. O artigo analisado foi destacado de um corpus produzido na pesquisa que realizo no âmbito do programa de Doutorado em Educação da Faculdade de Educação da USP. Tal artigo, intitulado “Qual é o tempo médio das aulas de Matemática nas escolas públicas de periferia?”, foi publicado em 2004 nos anais do “II Seminário Internacional de Pesquisa e Estudos Qualitativos: a pesquisa em debate”. A análise dos dados permitiu explicitar como certos enunciados são construídos de modo a provocar efeitos de sentido que encobrem contradições, concepções equivocadas e posicionamentos autoritários no tocante ao controle da dialogicidade do texto, além de veicular determinada acepção de Educação enviesada por conteúdos positivistas e idealistas. Tais resultados evidenciam que os estudos discursivos podem contribuir para o avanço das produções científicas materializadas em textos acadêmicos do campo da Educação Matemática.

Analysis of Political Metaphors in Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2020

On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this paper conducts a cognitive analysis of conceptual metaphors in Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2020, aiming to explain the metaphors in the State of the Union Address, reveal the political intentions hidden behind the metaphors, and construe the relationship between politics and metaphor. It is found that the metaphors in this State of the Union Address are: CONFLICT metaphors, BUILDING metaphor, JOURNEY metaphors, ORIENTATIONAL metaphors, and PLANT metaphors. Through the analysis, this paper concludes that conceptual metaphor has the function of persuading the masses and shaping the image of politicians. At the same time, this paper also finds that politics restricts the choice and application of metaphor.

SCIENTIFIC LINGUISTICS, A NEVER-ENDING HISTORY

1866 was a turning point in scientific linguistics when the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all papers and presentations on the origin of language. De Saussure locked up the debate with two concepts, diachrony and synchrony. I intend to examine the emergence of the hypothesis of a single origin of human articulated languages, in Africa first, and then Black Africa. The phylogenic approach of biological studies has today spread to linguistics. Sally McBrearty rejected the idea of a Neolithic revolution. Consequently, Black Africa became a major field of archaeological research. Yuval Noah Harari stating the existence of a symbolic revolution around 70,000 years ago, rejected Black Africa along with the Americas, and the Denisovans. Asia has become a major archaeological field. Julien d’Huy implements phylogenetic arborescent technique to the study of myths. The oldest form of a myth is not the origin of it. In oral civlizations some literate individual had to tell the story behind representations for the people to understand, appreciate, and remember them. I will then consider structural linguistics (Noam Chomsky & Universal Grammar). UG has never been able to develop semantics within its own system (Generative Semantics & George Lakoff). Science is always a temporarily approximate vision of what it considers. First, what any science explores is constantly evolving following phylogenic dynamics that are contained in the very objects of such scientific studies. Second, any new knowledge appearing in the field concerned causes a complete restructuration of what we knew before.

The Aftermath: Twenty-First Century Linguistics

This chapter revisits the major linguists of the Generative/Interpretive Semantics dispute (except Noam Chomsky, who fittingly gets his own chapter): Robin Lakoff, George Lakoff, Haj Ross, Paul Postal, and Jim McCawley, noting both their contributions and their post-dispute trajectories. It also charts out two broad legacies of the Generative Semantics movement: a number of technical proposals that arose in that framework which found themselves in other formal linguistic models, prominently including those associated with Chomsky; and the general “Greening of Linguistics”: a range of functional, cognitive, and usage-based approaches whose origins trace to the Generative Semanticists’ rejection of defining Chomskyan values.

Generative Semantics 4: The Collapse

This chapter traces the collapse of Generative Semantics, which ultimately became a movement away from Noam Chomsky’s view of linguistics, more than a movement toward a unifying vision of language or linguistics. The leaders all went in various directions. Paul Postal and Jim McCawley retained their commitments to formal modeling, but Postal developed a new, non-Transformational framework with David Perlmutter, Relational Grammar, while McCawley continued to ply an increasingly idiosyncratic Transformational model he eventually called Unsyntax. Robin Lakoff led the expansion of linguistic pragmatics and founded feminist linguistics. George Lakoff and Haj Ross took overlapping but distinct forays into non-discrete linguistics. Meanwhile, the Generative Semantics ethos was losing whatever appeal it may have had. Linguists outside the movement, and some within, found the style irritating. Meanwhile, too, Chomsky’s innovations were proving very fruitful and attracting adherents under the label, the Extended Standard Theory. Chomsky’s framework emerged from the brief Generative Semantics eclipse and now seemed the clear winner of the Linguistics Wars.

Generative Semantics 2: The Heresy

This chapter examines how Generative Semantics, which had emerged from Transformational Grammar as part natural extension of, and part challenge to, Noam Chomsky’s work, became a full-blown heretical divergence with Chomsky’s 1967 “Remarks on Nominalization” lectures, in which he took his theory in countervailing directions. Generative Semanticists had extended syntactic derivations deeper, diminished the lexicon, and enriched the scope of transformations. The lectures emphasized Surface Structure semantics, enriched the lexicon, and diminished the role of transformations. They were also dismissive of specific Generative Semantic innovations, especially those of George Lakoff. Lakoff attended the lectures. Sparks flew. Chomsky and his new proposals fared poorly across the linguistic landscape, where Generative Semantics rapidly took hold, but his own students, Ray Jackendoff at the fore, were inspired by the new direction (known variously as “Lexicalism,” “Extended Standard Theory,” and, contrapuntally to the heresy, “Interpretive Semantics”).

Language, Thought, and the Linguistics Wars

This chapter provides brief overviews of the role that language plays in culture and thought, of the job that linguists do to investigate the roles that language plays, and of the dispute among linguists that forms the narrative core of this book, as well as introducing the linguists who drove that dispute: Noam Chomsky, Ray Jackendoff, Robin and George Lakoff, Jim McCawley, Paul Postal, and Haj Ross. That dispute hinged on the relative significance of linguistic structure and linguistic meaning for the way we understand language and its relation to thought.

The Linguistics Wars

This book centers on a key rupture in the field of linguistics as a hegemony by the theories of Noam Chomsky appeared to be taking hold, a rupture in the 1960s that began a flowering of alternate approaches to Chomsky's framework, but also reoriented his framework markedly. The rupture was between Generative Semantics, which pushed to include more and more meaning in linguistic theory, and Interpretive Semantics, which resisted that push, putting more and more weight on syntactic structure. But in many ways the dispute can be reduced to George Lakoff, the most prominent voice on the more-meaning side, and Chomsky on the more-syntax side. Chomsky is a big personality, quiet and understated but always gesturing at monumental, revolutionary implications for his ideas, and always bringing great numbers of linguists along with him whenever he chases after those implications, stirring up psychology, philosophy, computer science, and other fields in the bargain. Lakoff is also big personality, anything but quiet or understated, equally comfortable gesturing at grand revolutions, equally happy to stir things up. They drive the story, but the story is about theories, data, and various technical developments, set among social currents that range from military industrial politics to the counterculture. All of these factors show up in the book, with a cast of other remarkable and influential characters. Noam Chomsky is unquestionably the most influential linguist of the twentieth century—many people claim of any century—whose work and personal imprint remains powerfully relevant today, so the book culminates with an analysis of Chomsky’s influence and legacy.

Metafoorid, millega me töötame: kogumismetoodika kajastused Eesti Rahva Muuseumi soome-ugri ekspeditsioonipäevikutes aastatel 1975–1989

Our aim is to examine how the principles of museum collecting are reflected in ethnographic fieldwork diaries. In recent decades, scholars and representatives of indigenous peoples have sharply criticized earlier modes of ethnographic collection and representation. The earlier acquisition policy was based on the understanding that ethnographers had a kind of prerogative to collect objects and that people had to relinquish their possessions in the name of science. By now such collecting practices have changed, but the analysis of the ethnographers’ earlier techniques enables us to gain a clearer sense of the historical context of museum collection. In this article, we study various metaphors related to museum collecting that we found in Soviet-era Finno-Ugric expedition diaries kept in the manuscript archive of the Estonian National Museum (ENM). We examine how the museum’s ethnographers used specific metaphorical expressions and descriptive models. An exploration of diaries through metaphors offers a way to discuss the formation of ethnographic knowledge. Such an approach can be more subjective, but the metaphorical models that reappear in the field diaries do show that certain beliefs and the fundamental nature of their expression were more prevalent among the museum’s staff. We analyze the diaries of Finno-Ugric fieldwork kept from 1975 to 1989, the most intensive period of the museum’s collecting work among the Finno-Ugric peoples. The objects collected during these years make up almost two thirds of the current Finno-Ugric collection of the ENM. The Finno-Ugric expedition diaries of the mature Soviet era reveal some metaphorical expressions and descriptions pertaining to museum collecting that are used repeatedly. We found that the metaphors of trade, war and loot characterized the era’s collection practices in the most expressive way. These metaphors reflect, in the humorous and grotesque key, the ENM’s staff’s perceptions of time-specific museological principles. In their 1980 monograph “Metaphors We Live By”, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson substantiated the universal potential of metaphor in human thought. While for Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is a tool that enables us to talk about reality, what is more important is that metaphors serve as a meeting place of fundamental questions concerning people’s everyday experience and life. The analysis of the ENM fieldwork diaries partially confirms Lakoff and Johnson’s view. Although ethnographers use metaphors of trade, war and loot in their fieldwork diaries, they need not always be related to existential reflections, but are often just an entertaining play on words. At the same time, the playful use of metaphors does not in itself preclude the fact that they also reflect the discourses of the deep structure of ethnographic consciousness.

Rhetorical Analysis of the Use of Metaphor in Ghana’s First and Former President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Political Speeches

In the late 1970s, linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Michael Reddy began to realize that metaphor was extremely common and related to thought and action. Indeed, they claimed that “our conceptual system…is fundamentally metaphoric in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Owing to this, metaphor is used in all-out endeavours: socially, economically, politically, etc. From this perspective, this paper analyzes the use of metaphor in a corpus of speeches delivered by a prominent figure in Ghanaian politics. This is none other than one of the pioneers of African emancipation, the former and first president of the Republic of Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, in his fight for Independence for Ghana and African unity. It portrays the use of metaphor as a powerful tool to convey information, thereby making it more convincing to serve its intended purpose. It also reveals how Dr. Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first president) used rhetoric to achieve his political aims. It unravels the metaphors used in his speech delivered on 10th July 1953, which is collected from samples of his speeches published online. Secondly, this paper adopts the use of MIPVU (which is a systematic and transparent procedure for identifying linguistic metaphors). It achieves inter-coder reliability and does not identify conceptual metaphors. By adopting MIPVU, lexical units of the sentences will be examined and then the contextual meaning of the unit will be established to determine more basic meaning. If the contextual meaning contrasts with the basic meaning but can be understood in comparison with it, then the unit will be marked as a metaphor. When the metaphor was identified, I used critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology for data analysis. This paper's findings clearly demonstrate that the metaphor is predominant in political discourse and can actually trigger social action.