Resolução anafórica em português europeu L2: efeitos de animacidade e a posição do antecedente

This study investigates the interpretation of subject pronouns in L2 EP by Italian native speakers, to examine the following questions: In overt subject resolution, do L1 Italian - L2 European Portuguese learners behave like L1 EP speakers regarding antecedent animacy (a property at the syntax-semantics interface) at L2 developmental stages and at the near-native level?; When the antecedent in object position is animate, do L1 Italian - L2 EP learners exhibit permanent optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns but not of null subjects, as claimed by Sorace (2016), a.o.? Participants were 15 adult EP native speakers, 10 intermediate, 10 advanced and 10 near-native Italian adult learners of L2 EP. They were administered two multiple-choice tasks (speeded and untimed) with a 2x2 design crossing the following variables: animacy of the matrix object (animate vs. inanimate) and type of embedded pronominal subject (overt vs. null). Results indicate that L2 learners show problems only in the areas where the L1 and the L2 differ (Madeira, Fiéis & Teixeira, this volume), namely: the resolution of overt subjects in the presence of [-animate] object antecedent and the resolution of null subjects. Learners’ performance in these areas remains unstable even at the near-native level. These findings challenge the ideas that internal interfaces (syntax/semantics) are not persistently problematic and that null subjects are unproblematic in L2 anaphora resolution (cf. Sorace, 2011, 2016). They moreover point to the importance of L1 influence in L2 anaphora resolution, a factor generally played down in previous studies (e.g., Sorace, 2016).

Avaliação da linguagem oral e escrita no pré-escolar e nos primeiros anos de escolaridade

In this article, we present an assessment instrument aimed at diagnosing oral language and reading and writing skills in children attending pre-school (5 years) and the early years of primary school. The instrument was mainly designed for the school context, and it was developed in collaboration with kindergarten educators and primary teachers who participated in PIPALE - Preventive Intervention Project for Reading and Writing, a project which is integrated in the National Program for the Promotion of School Success. The instrument covers the assessment of phonological and syntactic awareness, comprehension of syntactic structures, early literacy, and reading and writing skills (word reading, word and sentence writing, text comprehension, and text production). Besides offering a detailed description of the structure and tasks of the instrument, the present study includes the results of the first implementation of this tool to a total of 495 students in pre-school, first grade and second grade. The results show significant differences between the three groups (pre-school, first grade and second grade) in phonological awareness (identification of initial syllable, initial phoneme and final rhyme) and between the younger groups and the second graders in syntactic awareness (acceptability judgement task) and early literacy skills. As for reading and writing skills, the results show better performance in reading tasks than in writing tasks, a strong significant correlation between phonological awareness and word reading and word writing, and between literacy skills and word reading and writing. We also found a milder correlation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension, as well as text writing. These results suggest that the instrument is effective for an early diagnosis and early intervention of reading and writing skills.

Deteção de linguagem tendenciosa em decisões judiciais

The linguistic expression of subjectivity is a complex phenomenon that has been the object of reflection by several sub-areas of Linguistics and, more recently, of Computational Linguistics. Linguistic subjectivity, in terms of the linguistic expression of the speaker's opinions and attitudes, affects all levels of discourse organization and is present, to different degrees, in diverse textual genres. Subjectivity and bias are connected, in the sense that the presence of bias in discourse has been related, both in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, to the occurrence of signs of subjectivity. Court decisions are an argumentative text genre that may convey traces of subjectivity but should not be biased. As a discourse that represents the State’s position on social matters, it should reflect the principle of Equality. Nonetheless, a preliminary analysis of cases of gender violence reveals that this is not always the case. The research proposed in this paper aims to study the linguistic formulations that convey subjectivity and bias in court decisions on gender violence against women. The goal is to develop a linguistic model to detect these instances of bias, with a future possibility of application in a tool for automatic detection of gender bias in discourse, fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. A corpus of court decisions on gender violence has been extracted from the public access database of Instituto de Gestão Financeira e Equipamentos da Justiça (IGFEJ), and has been subject to analysis. A set of examples has been compiled in the analytical section of this study, demonstrating the possibility of connecting certain linguistic features, such as mitigation and intensification mechanisms, evidential expressions and counter-argumentative movements, to the presence of subjectivity and bias in discourse.

Construções de verbos transitivos-predicativos em português: uma perspetiva transformacional

This article presents a proposal for the analysis of transitive-predicative verbal constructions, not derivable transformationally from completive constructions. The theoretical framework of operator-transformational grammar and the methodological principles of the reference framework of the Lexicon-Grammar are adopted herein. The article identifies a set of constructions and distinguishes them from other structures, usually identified as transitive-predicative structures in the literature

Predicados de comunicação em português europeu: nominalizações e nomes autónomos

This paper provides an overview of the verbal and noun predicates involving the concept of communication and their distribution in the lexicon‑grammar of European Portuguese. Two key concepts are used: (i) the agent‑speaker semantic role (and other related roles, such as message, and addressee), associated with the subject syntactic slot of these predicates; and (ii) the possibility of the verb to enter a verbum dicendi construction, i.e., introducing direct speech

Tempos do passado e tempos do futuro em confronto: diferenças e paralelismos

This paper deals with the main similarities and differences that arise between past and future tenses. In particular, we argue that, while the propositions associated with past tenses are completely settled and their truth-value can be evaluated at the speech time, the propositions described by future tenses cannot be seen as true or false at the utterance time since these linguistic forms are ramifying, in that they typically point to a variety of inertia histories or inertia worlds. Nevertheless, if we consider more closely some particular tenses in European Portuguese – namely the Pretérito Imperfeito (Imperfect) and the Pretérito Perfeito do Indicativo (simple past), as representatives of the past tenses, and the Futuro Simples (simple future) and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, as representatives of the future ones, we conclude that there are also some important parallels across the two temporal domains. We claim that both the Imperfeito and the Futuro Simples merely locate the situations in a past or future interval, respectively, and that the final interpretation of the sentences in which they occur is the result of the interaction of their temporal characteristics with aspectual and modal features. The Pretérito Perfeito and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, on the other hand, share the common property of imposing an additional temporal boundary beyond which the eventualities cannot take place; as a result, aspectual effects and modal readings are much more conditioned and pure temporal interpretations – both in the past and in the future – become greatly predominant.

Laterais do Português Europeu Contemporâneo: estruturação interna, robustez de traços e dados de aquisição

This work intends to discuss the distinctive features of the laterals in Contemporary European Portuguese, in particular the features [+lateral] and [+continuous], based on language acquisition data. For this purpose, the productions of 80 typically developing children aged between 3 and 4 years and eleven months were analyzed. The results show that, after the nasals, the lateral in onset position is the first sonorant to be acquired. If the laterals are distinguished from the rhotics by the marked feature [+lateral], it would be expected that the class of the rhotics would be acquired before the laterals, since the acquisition of segments is made by the gradual acquisition of marked features and by their combination with features already acquired. The fact that /l/ is acquired before the rhotics suggests that the feature [+lateral] is not responsible for establishing the contrast between the two classes. Based on the data analyzed, the feature [+approximant] is proposed to characterize the laterals and rhotics, distinguishing them from the other sonorants, and the feature [[±continuant] to differentiate the rhotics from the laterals, the latter being characterized by the negative value of this feature.

Microvariação na resolução de sujeitos pronominais: português europeu vs. italiano

The present study investigates the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in intrasentential contexts, considering the role of animacy in antecedent assignment. Participants were 15 native speakers of EP and 14 of Italian. Each language group was administered two multiple choice tasks (speeded and untimed), which had a 2x2 design, crossing the following variables: animacy of the matrix object (animate vs. inanimate) and type of pronominal embedded subject (overt vs. null). Results indicate that there is microvariation in the resolution of overt pronominal subjects in EP and in Italian: the position of the antecedent is the most relevant factor in EP, whereas, in Italian, the animacy of the antecedent is the preponderant factor. Results also show that there is microvariation in the resolution of null subjects (contra previous claims in the literature): the bias for subject antecedents is weaker in Italian than in EP. Possible reasons for the observed microvariation are discussed in detail.

Corpora and L2 acquisition: the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of CEDEL2

This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 is a large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus of L2 Spanish which contains written productions from learners at all proficiency levels as well as 6 native control subcorpora (total size: over 1,100,000 words from over 4,000 participants). CEDEL2 follows strict corpus design criteria (Sinclair, 2005) and learner corpus design recommendations (Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021a). In its current version (CEDEL2 v. 2), its Portuguese component includes an L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus, with 21,662 words written by 164 participants, and an L1 Portuguese native subcorpus, with 3,500 words from 16 L1 speakers of European Portuguese. Thanks to their design features (e.g., same design across subcorpora, inclusion of metadata about SLA-relevant variables, dual native control subcorpora) and freely available web interface, CEDEL2 and its Portuguese subcorpora allow researchers to investigate a wide range of topics in SLA.

Concordar em discordar: análise discursivo-pragmática da polémica verbal em textos de opinião sobre o Acordo Ortográfico de 1990

The main goal of this study is to analyze the construction of the polemical discourse, from a corpus composed by opinion texts concerning the Orthographic Agreement of 1990 (from now on OA90), taking into account the perspective of Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Argumentation and Interactional Linguistics. The analysis of the corpus allows us to conclude that the speakers manipulate several strategies in the construction of their arguments, always with the intention of provoking and perpetuating the dissent.