Repositório RCAAP

The subject of this article is paraphrastic reformulation, non-paraphrastic reformulation and discourse ethos and its traces in academic writing in Spanish. It analyzes the use of connective devices and discourse markers in texts written by specialists (discourse linguists) and texts written by graduation students in this area.

This text is a communication delivered in the Colloquium of the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, Freud and language, in September 2007, which presents the author’s study on the genesis of the sign, highlighting its activity of symbolization.

This text is the product of a communication delivered in the “Journée d’études Les linguistes et leurs graphiques” at Chicago University Center in October 2007. It is developed some reflections on the notions of scheme, diagram, schematic form, mental gesture, language and gestures.

In this text we resume the debate, this time through a Culiolian optic, on the antithetic sense of primitive words, originally formulated by Sigmund Freud and initially rediscussed in the last century by Émile Benveniste, but by other authors as well.

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We test the hypothesis that the implementation of dependencies at the level of discourse has a higher processing cost than the implementation of dependencies within syntax alone. To this end we use event-related potentials to examine the implementation of anaphoric links established between pronouns and non commanding antecedents (discoursebased dependency) and contrast that with the processing of anaphoric links to commanding antecedents (syntax-only dependency). The experimental results obtained show a N400-like effect associated with the formation of the pronoun-non-commanding antecedent dependency. This enhanced negativity for pronouns resolved to non-commanding antecedents supports our hypothesis that discourse-based processes place different computational demands on the comprehension system than syntax-only processes. This kind of evidence is thus consistent with models of pronominal representation whereby antecedents are established by both syntactic and non-syntactic means.

The text describes, illustrates and examines Grice’s Implicature Theory in its pattern form. It aims to demonstrate that such types of inferences are a consequence of the Principle of Cooperation and the maxims which Grice judged of being able to justify the pragmatic complementation of the semantic basis, both sustaining the significant complex of a discursive fragment.

This paper discusses the idea of proper name having or not meaning, a relevant topic in the Philosophy of Language.

The article, with Psycholinguistics elements and supported by Computer Science, provides information on research that aimed at examining the reading prediction and linguistic plans in elementary school students considering the way of presentation-virtual and non-virtual. The methodology developed reading activities in virtual and non-virtual way of presentation as well as it was used pre and post tests also presented virtually and non-virtually. The results provide information on procedures and performance of participants, considering linguistic plans, text genre, way of presentation and students characteristics (school year and gender).

Within the multiple and inter-related processes that are involved during the reading activity, word recognition and word comprehension are essential. One of the perspectives exposed by the literacy is that the reading fluency is the primary condition to reading comprehension, although not the only one, hence efficient reading does not guarantee reading comprehension. The present study also examined the inverse possibility: is that possible to have a good textual comprehension despite of the weakness in word reading abilities? This study compared second grade children’s performance in isolated-word reading and textual reading comprehension tasks in order to investigate correlations and the possibility of dissociations between those two processes. The data analysis showed a strong correlation between the mentioned abilities. Although it was possible to verify the presence of some children with high ability to recognize words and low capacity in text comprehension, the data does not suggest dissociation in the inverse way, that is, high categories of text comprehension even when in the presence of low isolated-word reading scores. Implications for clinical and educational interventions are discussed.

This study centers its attention on the socio-cognitive appropriation of writing on the basis of vigotskian intersubjectivity concepts, proposing a ressignificance of the concept of intrasubjectivity delineated by this russian theoretician. This ressignificance proposal relies on the connectionism, in search of an approximation of the neurosciences, due to the comprehension that Vigotski, at the beginning of the 20th century, when dealing with the intrasubjective universe, brought important elements that, somehow, can evoke the neural processing of learning subjacent to the connectionism. Under this theoretical framing, the research seeked to answer the following question: What relations is it possible to infer between the configuration of the intersubjective relations kept by the child and the socio-cognitive appropriation of the written language in relation to the formal configuration and to its social uses? The study has been developed in a poor community, in the periphery of Florianópolis/SC/BR, in 2008. The characteristics of the intersubjective universe of the child and its conceptions about the written language have been analyzed. The categories of analysis have contemplated familiar and schooling aspects in reference to the uses of writing and cognitive abilities of the children in order to deal with writing as an instrument of intersubjective relationship. The theoretical rationale for this work relies on studies of Vigotski on development and learning, language and thought and concept formation, as well as on foundations of the cognitive neurosciences and the connectionism.

From previous works that had been delineating a way that would lead us to propose some questions concerning the constitution of the infantile identity, we intended, in this article, to bring up the way the child, who has the portuguese as her mother tongue, constitutes herself as a subject, by means of the use she makes of linguistics elements like pronouns, verbs etc., but also discoursives elements as the co-enunciative positions of opposition in relation to the other, in contexts of dialogical interaction and socialization with the parents, without mentioning the cognitive aspects that involves this process.

Language teaching has become more and more important in the academic world. This article briefly analyses the Behaviorist theory, the cognitive theory, creative construction theory and the connectionist paradigm. We present the theories and their main aspects are emphasized. We have concluded that foreign language teaching faces serious problems when using the existing models. The connectionist paradigm can provide a plausible explanation for constructing a foreign language teaching approach that meets the recent findings in neuroscience.

This article presents the main findings of a study on the resources employed to lexical inferencing by sixteen proficient readers of L2, based on Nassaji (2003). The main questions under scrutiny were: (a) what are the strategies and knowledge sources used by the participants?; (b) is there a correlation between resource type and lexical inferencing? Data analysis revealed that re-reading and analysis were the subjects’preferential strategies, the same holding true for discursive and morphological knowledge sources. Furthermore, despite the successful use of such resources, no correlation between them and lexical inferencing was found.

This article aims at presenting different perspectives on anxiety in foreign language learning. A number of studies involving this variable concerning oral and written production as well as linguistic awareness are presented. The existing instruments to measure anxiety in various contexts were analised and their eficiency was discussed.

This article aims at analyzing the long-term effects of formal instruction in the acquisition of implicit knowledge of the Spanish pronoun SE by a group of Brazilian learners. The initial study indicated that the pedagogical intervention that was conducted increased accuracy rates in both comprehension and production tasks. A new set of tests were applied to the same participants two years after the first data collection in order to verify if the beneficial effects of instruction would be long-lasting. The predictions were confirmed thus providing evidence for the Weak Interface Hypothesis with respect to the interaction between explicit and implicit knowledge in L2 learning.

The objective of this article is to present a research carried out by Raymundo, in 2006, with the purpose of elaborating and validating an instrument of linguistic consciousness level evaluation of adult learners of English, native speakers of Portuguese. Ten instruments were elaborated and a complete validity process was accomplished – content, construct and criterion-related – according to a stipulated script of procedures. The examination of the validity of this type of instrument showed that it is possible to construct a reliable test based on levels of linguistic consciousness defined as pre-consciousness 1, pre-consciousness 2, consciousness and full consciousness from the judgment, identification, correction and/or explanation of interlingual and intralingual errors.

This paper aims to present the metaphoric language as a reflection of ways of thinking and reasoning. As so, the expressions manifested in different languages may reveal common ways of reasoning. Taking into consideration the teaching perspective, we understand that trying to identify the interculture similarities is a relevant factor. In this particular aspect, dictionaries serve as an important means to teach language. The theoretical principles on which we base this work are those described in the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980; 1999) and Kövecses (2001; 2005). The lexicographic works which were chosen are: Deignan 1997),Collins Cobuild (1999) and Borba (2004). These dictionaries have their entries extracted from data based upon written and spoken language corpora.

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The present paper aims to show some aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s life as well as to describe the historical context in which this poet, short-story and essay writer lived. The biography of this North-American author is permeated by uncertainties, doubts and mystery, features that the writer transposes to his texts, thus creating a fantastic atmosphere which, most of the time, is beyond human understanding.