Instituto de Linguística Teórica e Computacional

The purpose of this study is to analyze to what extent the learning of Spanish as a foreign language by Chinese-speaking university students causes changes in their personal and sociocultural identities. Personal variables (gender, level of Spanish) and types of motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic) are studied in relation to six dimensions of identity: self-confidence; reduction of cultural identity; expansion of cultural identity; reinforced identity; divided cultural identity; and no change. To do this, a questionnaire applied to 301 students from three Chinese public universities that include a Hispanic language and culture faculty has been designed and validated. Statistical analysis shows that (i) women are more flexible and open to new forms of linguistic and cultural knowledge; (ii) students motivated by a personal taste for learning Spanish and for relationships with Hispanic cultures develop greater self-confidence and a reinforced identity that integrates the two cultures; and (iii) students motivated by the desire to get good grades develop greater selfconfidence, but also a divided cultural identity.

A persistência de uma pronúncia não nativa é um facto reconhecido no âmbito da investigação em aquisição / aprendizagem de língua não materna. Entre os fatores que o explicam, e independentemente dos diferentes quadros teóricos, o conhecimento linguístico prévio ocupa um lugar de destaque. Em causa estão não só os condicionamentos relacionados com as habilidades articulatórias já treinadas, mas também, e sobretudo, a capacidade de reconhecer/definir (novos) alvos com exatidão. Neste trabalho pretende contribuir-se para uma descrição da interfonologia de três grupos de aprendentes que têm como língua materna o espanhol, o italiano e o francês. Mais especificamente, em causa está uma área do sistema fonológico consonântico em que estas três línguas se distinguem entre si e se diferenciam do português: os róticos. Os dados foram recolhidos num corpus de produções orais, tendo sido analisados os níveis de convergência e de desvios. Os resultados mostram padrões diferenciados para os três grupos de informantes e comportamentos distintos também em função do contexto sintagmático em que surge a consoante.

This study aims to revisit the essential dimensions of the suffix -inho in Portuguese, either in the European or in the Brazilian Portuguese, and analyzes some of the descriptions that have been made of them, in order to clarify (i) the systemic value of -inho in the word-formation network of the Portuguese language, and (ii) the values of use that it admits, due to several variables, such as: the nature of the base to which it connects, the intonation and the elocutive’s intensity with which it is used, the illocutionary intentionality of the speaker, the evaluative value to be transmitted, the formal, informal, ironic and situational context and message in which it occurs.It is important to differentiate the systemic values of the suffix from the values that the derivative in which it occurs conveys, due to the characteristics of the text and the linguistic situation in which it is used. In a text produced in ironic or sarcastic register, the whole message is permeated by these values, but it cannot be affirmed that the systemic value of the suffix is that of irony or sarcasm, classes that do not configure any derivational paradigm of Portuguese.Thus, besides to provide a categorization of the semantic-pragmatic values associated with the use of this suffix and to reanalyze some myths that persist in some of its descriptions, the elaboration of this text has also a pedagogical intention: to provide PL2 learners with an overview of the values and uses of the diminutive suffix -inho in Portuguese, that allows them to effectively use the suffix in their interaction with native speakers of Portugal or of Brazi

La normalización idiomática y lingüística es una constante preocupación para los intelectuales que están abocados a la enseñanza de las lenguas andinas, el quechua no se exime de esta necesidad, pues siendo una lengua aún ágrafa y fragmentada en varios dialectos, requiere de estudios que contribuyan a su estandarización. Por tal razón, centramos nuestro interés en determinar el contexto morfológico de realización de la metátesis de alternancia de raíces en la producción de textos escritos en quechua por estudiantes de la UNSCH, 2013.

The paper presents a critical assessment of the place reserved for lexical expressions with discourse-related meanings in four major functional theories of language, also considering a few narrower-scope accounts of linguistically encoded pragmatic meaning. I argue that the status of discourse-related lexemes is not duly recognized in most functionally-oriented frameworks and make the point that, by contrast, Functional Discourse Grammar finds itself in an optimal position to offer an adequate account of this specific type of linguistic expressions. Yet, I will claim that the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to lexical expressions of pragmatic meaning is not entirely satisfactory, namely in that the lexemes in question are assumed to be inserted into the relevant slots of underlying pragmatic structure without being modeled as a separate type of linguistic unit. I will therefore suggest that discourse-related lexemes be redefined as a distinct layer of the hierarchically organized pragmatic structure of linguistic utterances, just as lexemes with purely representational content are assigned to a distinct layer of semantic structure. Empirically, the advantages of this proposal are illustrated with the analysis of authentic English examples, mainly from the GloWbE corpus (https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/: Davies and Fuchs in English World-Wide 36:1–28, 2015), plus a number of other examples from the internet and from previously published research.

In Umutina the distribution of main word stress is sensitive to the sonority degree of vowels within a two-syllable window at the right side of the word, a property which it shares with a number of other languages. What makes Umutina particularly interesting is the fact that low sonorant onsets in the word final syllable impede the retraction of stress to the prefinal syllable, even when the prefinal nucleus is more sonorant than the final one. A constraint analysis is proposed based on the hypothesis that what makes syllables with low sonorant onsets prominent is the sharp sonority rise between a low sonorant onset and the following nucleus.

This paper presents the review and evaluation of DiZer – an automatic discourse analyzer for Brazilian Portuguese. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic analyzer that makes use of linguistic patterns learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory results for scientific texts. In order to test its portability, DiZer is also evaluated with news texts and presents acceptable performance.