RCAAP Repository

The relationship between bilingualism and cognition has been investigated by several researchers, both in Canada, as more recently in Brazil. Bilingualism can be associated with better maintenance of inhibitory control and conflict resolution (BIALYSTOK, 2009). The goal of this paper is to review Brazilian and Canadian research on the positive effects of bilingualism. The cognitive benefits found in Canadian bilinguals have not been always found in southern Brazil bilingual speakers of Portuguese and a variety of German called Hunsrückisch. It is possible that the lack of identification of the advantages in Brazilian bilinguals is related to the tasks used in the studies and multiple factors as a distinct socioeconomic reality, schooling, unbalanced bilingualism, among other factors discussed in this article.

Presentation of the issue: Discourse studies

Presentation of the Literature issue on Portuguese-language literature

Based on three texts by Thomas Mann (a short story, a novella and a novel), the author tries, narratively, to express the tensions which are in the work of this German writer, establishing a dialogue with his contemporary interlocutor Theodor Adorno. The objective is to light the relationships that are established here between literature and philosophy.

This work aims at bringing up some discussion about the analysis of statistical data, and a priori conclusions, highlighting the importance of considering, among other issues, the orthogonality in the distribution of data, since some reflections were generated by some of the results obtained with the VARBRUL program. Therefore, we will present the (i) results from the analysis of tu/você switch in the localities of VARSUL where the process exists, and (ii) analysis of Noun Agreement (NA) in the Paraná cities - Londrina, Irati and Pato Branco. In the analysis of NA, we realized that there are differences regarding the selection of variables, depending on the type of colonization of the analyzed region (for Londrina and Pato Branco, internal colonization; for Irati, external colonization) - the reason why Curitiba city, the "old" Paraná, was not considered in this paper. In the analysis of tu/você switch (LOREGIAN-PENKAL, 2004), we emphasize the importance of considering the analysis of the variation in the individual which, mutatis mutandis, can be applied to individual results of the NA in the three cities. The data analyzes followed the quantitative sociolinguistics steps with VARBRUL package, and took into account extralinguistic and linguistic factors. We hope to demonstrate how the VARSUL database has been contributing to the description of the variable phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese.

In Brazilian Portuguese oral falling diphthongs, the glides [j] and [w] may be deleted according to a variable rule, as in peixe~ pexe, caixa~caxa and ouro~oro. In our study, we proceed to the real-time analysis of the switching variable [ej] and [e] in the speech community of Porto Alegre, RS. We select a sample of 14 informants in the city of Porto Alegre (RS), from the NURC Project database, interviewed in the 1970s and recontacted in the late 1990 by VARSUL Project, thus totalizing 28 interviews. We proceed to the collection and coding of 1.791 data. The coded data were submitted to statistical analysis program GoldVarb 3.0. In order to observe the behavior of the variable in terms of stability or change in progress (LABOV, 1994), our real-time analysis of the results identified the monophthongization of [ej] as a stable phenomenon of variation.

The present work proposes a reading of the narrative structure of the Novel based on the concept of conspiracy, as established by Ricardo Piglia in 2009. This secret conjuration which underlies the apparent functioning of reality replaces the fatalistic notion of destiny present in Greek classic tragedy, introducing politics in the Novel under the form of human articulations. In addition to the function of the conspiracy in the development of the narrative, this essay proposes the approximation of the idea of an extreme exacerbation of the possibilities of human articulation to the considerations proposed by Gilles Lipovetsky about the consequences of the time of the hyper individualism. The game of associations that sets the structure of the plot intend to work as a indirect way, provided with the necessary distance to unveil what the logic of the organizations of the liberal system hides, functioning as a possible tool to investigate the current reconfigurations of the relationship between literature and market.

The literary history have been thinking about its methods in order to reach new forms for organize its object. One possibility came from the literary historiography through literature itself: the esthetic learning of history. Join this, the concept of “world literature” (form Goethe to Franco Moretti) and the work of Enrique Vila-Matas (whom creates a literary history inside his fiction) can help in the goal of to comprehend the contemporary models of literary history and its exhaustion.

This study presents an analysis of the phenomena of vowel reduction and deletion from speech data by an adult and two children aged six years from Florianópolis. Stressed vowels ([i, , u]) and unstressed final ([ɪ, ɐ, ʊ]) are observed in order to determine whether the factors stress and age influence the acoustic parameters of duration and frequency of resonance (F1 and F2). The results have indicated influence of stress such that the end groups carried out vowels unstressed final lower and a reduction in area F1-F2. The data have also shown cases of unstressed vowel deletion which occur predominantly with high vowels and after unvoiced consonants contexts. By comparing adult and children, the relative duration does not show significant differences. On the other hand, for F1 and F2, the results corroborate partially studies that point out the frequencies decrease when the age increases. This study aim to contribute for both the research about the children´s speech and the research about Florianópolis´s speech.

This study aims at understanding the process of accommodation of two Northeastern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, in the light of Communication Accommodation Theory (GILES et al., 1987) and Variation Theory (LABOV, 1966; 1972). The phonological phenomenon focused on this paper is the realization of coronal fricative /S/ in coda position, since this segment clearly marks the difference between the dialects (Joao Pessoa (State of Paraiba) x Recife (State of Pernambuco). The corpus consisted of seven informants from Paraiba living in Recife for more than 2 years. The data collected from interviews with informants were subjected to statistical analysis by Goldvarb X (SANKOFF, TAGLIAMONTE & SMITH, 2005). The results, based upon quantitative and qualitative analysis, show that the relevant variables to the phenomenon were length of residence, amount of exposure to dialect and frequency of visits to Paraiba

The objective of this study was to investigate the variation between CCV and CV syllables in the speech of children with acquisition completed, taking the theoretical assumptions of the Usage-based Phonology and Exemplar Models. In this approach, it is assumed that mental representation is composed of multiple exemplars and that the linguistic structure emerges from the usage. It was used repetition of words, picture naming, story retelling and memory game interaction procedure using figures that represent words with tautosyllabic consonantal clusters. The results indicated that the words had different behavior regarding the cancellation of the vibrant of tautosyllabic clusters in the speech of children with acquisition completed. The factors of individual, word, tonicity, size and token frequency were found to be relevant.

In this paper we analyze the variation of bilabial plosive [p, b] in the speech of Brazilian Portuguese in contact with Hunsrückisch. This linguistic phenomenon may occur in bairro~pairro e porongos~borongos. For this study we analyze the recorded speech obtained from twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews. The data were quantitatively analyzed with the help of VARBRUL computational program package, in their GoldVarb X version, in order to verify the linguistic and extralinguistic factors which constrain the realization of the plosives. As a result of this study, the frequency of variation of bilabial plosives is low. Older informants, women, bilinguals and informants with lower education levels tend to apply the variable rule

This paper is about the use of flap where a trill is expected in Brazilian Portuguese (cachorro~cachoro, arroz~aroz) by German descendants in situated speech. Both quantitative (LABOV, 1972) and microinteractional qualitative analysis (LODER; JUNG, 2008; GARCEZ, 2008) of the data are done. The quantitative analysis showed that the variable age plays a role in the use of flap: it is favored by participants who are older than 40 years old and disfavored by participants who are younger than 40 years old. The microinteractional qualitative analysis of speech in social interaction revealed that the variable use of flap is generally not made relevant by the participants. A single use of flap by a participant who is younger than 40 years old was problematized by the interactants. We claim that the problematization is due to the expectations derived from common sense shared knowledge: young people are not expected to make such a use of flap in Brazilian Portuguese, an expectation which is also expressed by the relative weights obtained by the quantitative variable rule analysis. Older participants by their turn are expected to use flap instead of trill in Brazilian Portuguese, so the participants do not make that use relevant in the interaction. This expectation also conforms to the tendency verified by the quantitative analysis.

This work is supposed to investigate the relationships between photograph and comics, analyzing three examples in which these relationships are presented in a particular way: the books Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Waltz with Bashir, by Ari Folman and David Polonsky; and The Photographer, by Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel Guibert and Frédéric Lemerciel. The main goal is to understand Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur under a contemporary perspective, in which the literature totalization occurs not only through the adventure of idiom and culture alterity, but also through the cross of very different narrative languages. Therefore, this work wishes to offer a kind of model for the analysis of multimodal works, which do not have a solid theory for them yet – precisely because they are something new.

The main goal of this paper is to discuss what are the most usual/productive forms of participle in Brazilian Portuguese, to understand the distribution of regular and irregular forms in compound tenses (tinha pago/pagado – 'had paid') and passive constructions (foi pago/pagado – '(it) was paid'), and the unexpected choice of irregular participles in contexts where, according to grammatical tradition, one would expect the use of regular forms (tinha chego instead of tinha chegado – 'had arrived'). We performed a quantitative analysis using the VARBRUL software. The results, however, are shown only in terms of frequencies, since the phenomenon is not necessarily characterized as a variable rule. Data from two corpora have been analyzed quantitatively: VARSUL Database (Variação Linguística na Região Sul do Brasil) and tests of productivity containing dictionarized words and pseudowords. The results showed a general preference for regular forms in spontaneous speech data. We observed, however, a peculiar use of irregular participle in data from tests of productivity, possibly justified by the prestige of those forms.

This paper presents the findings of a survey on final unstressed mid vowel raising in Portuguese language spoken by descendants of Polish immigrants in the city of Vista Alegre do Prata-RS. Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Variation Theory, 24 personal experience interviews with informants from the community were carried out. The statistical analysis of data has shown us that the rule has a modest recurrence in the community, being the /o/ raising more frequent than the /e/ raising. It was also verified that linguistic and social variables affect the application of the rule for both vowels.

This work deals with mid vowel variation in unstressed (pretonic) vowel. We analyze this kind of vowel in Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Belem, Pará, northern Brazil. The corpus is formed by 1.434 data from 48 native speakers stratified by sex, age and school level. The results show that the mid variant is more frequent than the high and low variants in the Portuguese language spoken in the urban area of the city. The factor groups that condition the mid vowel in unstressed syllable production are: a) vowel in stressed syllable; b) distance between stressed and unstressed syllable; c) suffix; d) onset consonant; e) syllabic weight; f) school level and g) age

Presentation of the issue: Language and Cognition: interfaces between Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

The use of falling diphthongs has been widely discussed in studies based on Variationist Sociolinguistics in a considerable part of Brazil. The results obtained have demonstrated that the reduction of these diphthongs in words such as “touro”, “eixo”, for instance, is almost categorical, and, in its majority, the social constraints such as gender, age, and years of schooling are no longer significant, i.e. they are not selected by the computational programme responsible for the statistical analysis of the data, GOLDVARB. The concern towards the written language has not been as general as to the oral language, thus the interest in working with the former variable. Our objective in this paper is to investigate the interference of speech in writing through the monophthongisation process of the diphthongs [ej] ~ [e] e [ow] ~ [o] in 3rd to 5th year Ensino Fundamental students in one public and one private school in the city of João Pessoa. The authors who served as theoretical support to the research were Mollica (2000), Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Almeida e Zavam (2004), Hora (2006), Bisol (1999) e Paiva (1996). The data collected through the tests, which were elaborated in accord with the dependent and independent variables controlled in the study, were analysed statistically, as aforementioned, by means of the GOLDVARB programme. Amongst the main results we have found that: the male students monophthongised more than the female ones; the monophthogised occurrences are less frequent to the extent that the level of schooling is higher; the monophthogisation of the diphthong [ow] is more productive than that of [ej]; the students from the private school monothongise less than those from the public school; and the variants coronal consonants and palatal consonants, when preceding the diphthong [ow], were selected as strongly favourable ones for the deleting of the semivowel from the diphthongs.

Description of intonation in assertive statements in Portuguese spoken in Natal, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre. In this article, we analyze the speech of 12 informants, men and women, equally distributed in three locations in different regions of Brazil, with the aim of describing intonational behaviors based on the corpus of the “Atlas Linguístico do Brasil” (ALiB). After analyzing the data using the computational program PRAAT, we have found, on the autossegmental and metric theory, the following phonological patterns: H*________ H+L*L%; L+H*_______H+L*L%; and L+H*________H+H*L%. Papers of this nature are relevant to the preparation of prosodic letters and to the description of Portuguese.