Repositório RCAAP

Assuming that Pragmatics is the area of linguistics that prioritizes the study of the principles that guide human communication processes considering the contexts in which interactions are placed, and that its cognitive-inferential aspects posits that the understanding of the meaning of a statement (whether oral or written) considers the mental and the social circumstances of those who produced it, this paper will use as theoretical concepts some aspects introduced by Sperber and Wilson in their Relevance Theory (1995), such as the definition of “context” as a dynamic psychological construct of assumptions about the world. Considering also that the case study is a consolidated and adequate research methodology to discuss specific situations, we will analyze an episode submitted to a Brazilian Court. In this situation, the intention was to exclude from the internet videos that were discriminatory to practitioners and social practices of African-Brazilian religions, in order to discuss the importance of the introduction of Pragmatics studies, especially of cognitive-inferential trends, in the literacy process of the legal professionals.

Computerized solutions for solving concrete everyday problems are structured through deductive algorithms. However, even before designing algorithms, there is an abductive step guided by the goal to be achieved, which is usually neglected. Following Rauen’s (2014) Goal Conciliation Theory, I intend in this study to describe and explain the process of formulation, execution and checking of ante-factual abductive hypotheses in developing a computerized solution.

Although Erico Verissimo’s novels are not epistolary strict sense, the letter appears as an important element in the structure of writer’s fictional work. In this article we intend to show that, as a narrative feature, these letters reveal not only the depths of the characters, but also introduce historical and social issues which are relevant to the literary representation. As theoretical orientation we work with the notes of Watt (2010) and Lajolo (2002).

This paper presents a theoretical research that has as its object of analysis Google´s search engine. It starts with a hypothesis, inaugurated by Yus through Cyberpragmatic, explaining that the Relevance Theory is able to give a scientific explanation to human activities all over the Net, considering that according the mentioned theorist, the researches concerning to cognitive procedures of human mind in physicals scenarios necessarily imply a parallelism over virtual environments. Therefore, due to the blurring of the distinction between virtual and real, the relevance, in addition to guiding communication mediated by Internet, also guides any online human activity. Among the human activities on Net, this research focuses the relevance sought by the system for an user as a place of analysis, in view of that the result of Google search engine fits exactly on that area. From an operational point of view, the defended hypothesis refers that tools provided by Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson), associated with the findings of Cyberpragmatic (Yus), have ability to analyze and describe the Google search engine. Moreover, this study assumes that the search engine ‹metarepresents› a goal of an user who uses its search interface, maximizes the relevance of its input (inquiry, search) supplying outputs (search engine results) according to the relevance of each user, increasing the cognitive effects and decreasing the processing effort applied to reach the goal which motivated the search. In support of this assumption, it presents the technological advances concerning Google search engine, with the introduction of its new algorithm - Hummingbird - and Semantic Web, besides the recognition of user behavior on Internet and the personalization of search results in order to attend, in a relevant way, to the needs and intentions of users, in an attempt to contextualize the user experience.

The present article is focused in letters that Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) wrote from 1913 to 1916, a period marked by his intelectual and esoteric crisis, and also by the production of cultural projects needed to take away the cultural stagnation from the timid Portuguese capitol. Important letters are from this period, marked by sincerity and confession to the addresses, as Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues (1891-1971) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), unlike of what happens in the next years after 1927, when Pessoa writes to the members from the Presença magazine, choosing to keep informations as a secret. It’s what happens at the knowing letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, wrote in January 13th, 1935, in which he denies to belong to some secret order, unlike it’s found in a autobiographical write, not published during his lifetime. I take, as main theoretical frame of reference to the study of letters, Crabbé Rocha’s proposals, in the book A epistolografia em Portugal. In many Pessoa’s letters poems transcripts are found. This way, the study about Pessoa’s letters allows to understand the symbolic and metaphoric aspects contained in the poems. To the analysis about the esoteric speech contained in Pessoa’s letters, I use Manuela Parreira da Silva, Dalila Pereira da Costa e Yvette Centeno’sstudies.

This paper argues that a ‘minimal semantic’ theory does not account for the levels of appeal to context needed to evaluate truth at the propositional level. Specifically, it is argued that, beyond pronominal appeals allowed for by minimalists, pragmatics can permeate propositional content in a number of ways. These include saturation, free enrichment, and strengthening and loosening of constituent concepts. The first relates to how context aids referencing of indexicals; the second to unarticulated constituents (for example, ‘he paid’ with the unarticulated constituent being ‘the bill’) and the third to how context can fix ambiguities that may arise from attributing a specific meaning to a concept (For example, metaphorical as opposed to literal). By showing that pragmatic processes operate at the propositional level, it is concluded that a view which sees semantics as being primary to determining meaning at the propositional level and pragmatic processes as secondary is erroneous. Instead, a more plausible argument is that the two processes are parallel, which has two significant implications. The first is that propositions can only be fully assessed at utterance level. The second is that advocates for a computational, modular account of how the mind is modelled may need to revise their theory, based on the parallel processing argument.

This paper aims to exemplify the importance of joining two areas, namely Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, for dealing with the challenges of the brand-new area of study on teaching Brazilian Portuguese as a foreign language to refugees in Brazil. In this context, it seems appropriate to consider the demands and goals of this population when learning Portuguese as a foreign language. The analyses were based on two posters, which were published by the media as part of the materials used to report on the popular protests against the football World Cup held in Brazil in 2014.

Wilson (2004) designs an example to explain the notion of cognitive effects employing three assumptions as initial cognitive context: (1) “I’ll (probably) catch the bus” (2) “If I catch the bus, I’ll get to the lecture” and (3) “If I don’t catch the bus, I’ll miss the lecture” and two possible achievements: case A, the individual catches the bus and gets to the lecture, and case B, the individual does not catch the bus and misses the lecture. In the example, Wilson (2004) has to preview at least two opposite options in the initial cognitive context to use only modus ponens as an elimination rule, suggesting that this arrangement is necessary in all uses of conditionals. In this article we argue that the biconditional architecture can be applied to the example, decreasing the initial processing cost and keeping the logical adequacy. We also argue that a goal conciliation architecture can explain not only cases where options like yes/no can be anticipated, but also situations where options like yes/no-alternatives are viable, increasing the empirical plausibility of the analysis.

This paper deals with the use of hedging strategies in academic writing, which are considered a linguistic act to intensify or reduce the illocutionary force of scientific statements. The study aims to analyze different types of hedging used in Chinese students’ bachelor degree theses in three different languages (Chinese, English and Portuguese). The result shows that both text moves and languages in writing may influence hedging strategies, however, differently for a given hedging category.

Presentation of the issue: Fonologia e variação fonético-fonológica  

The present study focuses on the diachronic development, behavior and meaning of the discourse marker afinal in Portuguese. A discussion of two semantic effects of afinal will be followed by a brief review of the history of its use. The view of conventionalized concessive and justificative senses proposed in the literature will be questioned here, and an alternative analysis will be offered, under which the marker afinal exploits its formal properties retained through the principle of persistence to trigger inferences of emphatic focus.

This paper aims to delineate a mythical and historical path of the poetry as curse, seeking to relate the parable of Abel and Cain with the ethos of modern literature. Therefore, at first, the idea is to verify how the poets are descendants of Cain, the outcast fratricide. In a second moment, we seek to identify a relation between creative genius and melancholy/disease. Finally, analyzing the cases of Balzac and Rimbaud, it’s possible to note some motifs of the accursed poetry: pride, rebellion, Satanism and melancholy. We emphasize that, to the literary and theoretical discourse, it will be given the same value, i.e., poetry takes the status of theory, and vice versa.

Presentation of Literature issue on Travel and Literature

This paper describes the intellectual connection between Tropicalism, the musical movement from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and Concretism, ideal of modern poetry in the 50s and 60s. For that, this study intends to demonstrate that both groups share similar artistic conceptions and, consequently, carry common avant garde ideas. The ideas exposed in the present essay were built by the reading of Verdade Tropical – written by Caetano Veloso – and the manifestos of concrete poets, compiled in 1965 and published under the title of Teoria da Poesia Concreta – 1950-1960.

The present paper analyses the reflexivization strategies in Georgian under Hornstein’s (1999, 2001) theta-role checking bymovement proposal as an attempt to explain the syncretism of the morpheme -i-, which occurs in reflexives, anticausatives and passives. This analysis goes against the idea that this morpheme is a valence or voice operator (cf. Nash, 2002), showing that it is rather the realization of an incorporated copy of the internal argument.

Firstly, the aim of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the studies concerning types of causatives in natural languages and to approach three types of causatives in Japanese language, namely, lexical causatives (improductives), syntactic causatives (productives), zero-driven causatives, and focus on its idiomatic phenomena seeking a greater contribution to the study of the grammatical structures of this language.

Revista do Globo Magazine (1929-1967) published a significant amount of literary texts in a variety of genres during its existence. The analysis of the literary material featured on the pages of the periodical may offer a complementary perspective to the ones already provided by Literary History, which should allow to shed light upon fields requiring further research or to confirm established arguments. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of poetry publication in Revista do Globo Magazine by presenting the issues as well as the main names published and raising hypotheses on quantitative, aesthetic and editorial changes throughout its history.

In the present research article we present an analysis of the syntactic argument alternation which occurs with the so-called aspectual verbs or aspectualizers. These items occur in two types of sentence, transitive or intransitive, which can be exemplified by pairs of sentences such as a professora começou a aula ‘the teacher started the class’/ a aula começou ‘the class started’. First of all, we argue that this alternation is not the causativeinchoative alternation, which occurs with change of state verbs, such as quebrar ‘break’ (o ladrão quebrou o vidro da porta ‘the thief broke the door glass’/o vidro da porta quebrou ‘the door glass broke’). We show how the analyzed phenomenon can be distinguished from the causative-inchoative alternation and we present pieces of evidence to support our claim. In what follows, we propose, following other authors, that aspectual verbs are operators and monoargumental predicators. In our analysis of the alternation of these items, we propose, then, that these verbs can have a derived transitive form, depending on the semantics of their only argument. As aspectualizers are operators over eventualities, their arguments must necessarily denote an eventuality. If such arguments are also predicates, their arguments will be able to appear in syntax in the subject position of the aspectual verbs, deriving a transitive sentence (just as happens with auxiliaries and raising verbs). Thus, we conclude that the argument alternation at stake is not an argument alternation of the aspectual verb per se, but an argument alternation of the embedded predicate, the argument of the aspectual verb.

The aim of this paper is to develop an analysis of Hanging Topic and Hanging Topic Left Dislocation in Brazilian Portuguese. To do so, we adopt the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), because it allows one to describe the rhetorical relations, and therefore to study the use contexts of some marked constructions. The corpus which is the basis of analysis of this research are the interviews published in the VEJA magazine in the 1970s, as well as Dialogues between Informant and Documenter (DID) provided by the NURC-SP project (Cultured Urban Linguistic Norm – São Paulo). From the data analysis, it was possible to notice a clear distinction between the uses of the constructions under investigation in the two corpora. We have noticed that hanging topics are discursive units per se, which relate to the context by a subordination relation and to the comment by Frame or Attribution. Hanging topics seem therefore to be pragmatically indistinguishable from frame-setting topics, once both exert the function of inaugurating complex discursive units, so as to preserve textual progression.

Ernest Hemingway became a writer in Paris in the 1920’s. The style of the future Nobel laureate was forged in the French capital, where he moved at the end of 1921. At the time, Paris was the heart of modernism and attracted major artists, which allowed Hemingway to keep contact with a cultural broth that shaped his training as a writer. This paper investigates the letters written by Hemingway in the first three months of his Parisian stay, contained in the first volume of his collected correspondence: The Letters of Ernest Hemingway - Volume 1, 1907-1922. The theorical basis is taken from French historian Michel de Certeau and Brazilian expert in epistolography Marcos Antonio de Moraes. The goal of this paper is to carry out a historical recovery of the period, examining the literary system, determining the relationships established by Hemingway and remembering the places mentioned in the correspondence.