RCAAP Repository

This article summarises the findings of a corpus-based study of pragmatic markers. The study comprised quantitative and qualitative analyses of a small specialised corpus of Brazilian learners' oral production in English at CEFR B1 and comparisons with benchmark corpora. It examined the most common discourse marking adverbs used to mediate segments of discourse in conversations, the most common explicit and implicit adverbial hedges used to mitigate representative speech acts and the most common minimal response tokens used to express good listenership. Subjects produced a limited range of discourse marking adverbs and response tokens. Investigations followed a form-to-function approach and indicated that learners underused the pragmatic and discourse functions of “well” and “actually” but demonstrated a consistent use of “really”; they overused “maybe” to convey epistemic stance and underused “just” as an implicit adverbial hedge; they produced “yeah” and “uhuh” as minimal response tokens, mostly to convey convergence.

This study explores the behaviour of (pre-)intermediate Spanish learners of English for the Tourism Industry at the transactional phase of a service encounter wherein they have to carry out one of the tasks for which they are trained: giving information at a tourist visitor centre. More specifically, this study analyses (i) the strategies wherewith they dispense tourist information, and (ii) how they attend to relational aspects during the encounter or manage rapport with tourists through such strategies and the information dispensed. Thus, this study purports to shed light onto learners’ skills prior to instruction in an area which, although usually included in ESP textbooks, seems to have been overlooked by practitioners in interlanguage pragmatics. The preliminary need diagnosis that this paper makes may be the foundation upon which pedagogical intervention may subsequently be designed.

This study addresses the question of whether there is positive language transfer through causative verbs in Chinese-Portuguese Simultaneous Interpreting, and in which aspects this transfer is more likely to occur. The paper begins by providing a brief discussion of language transfer and the causative construction in Chinese and Portuguese. Then, we present the methodology, in which 10 speeches delivered by Chinese leaders in intercultural contexts and their simultaneous interpretations are transcribed and analyzed. The results show that both Chinese source texts and Portuguese interpretations present a high percentage of causative verbs, and more than half of the data can be interpreted as positive transfer. We found that positive language transfer occurs and plays a very important role in Chinese-Portuguese Simultaneous Interpreting and may help interpreters facilitate information processing in order to achieve better performance.

Being linguistically competent is, besides mastering the morphosyntactic rules and semantics of each language, it is also to know the set of norms that regulate the proper behavior of the members of a particular social environment. Language, as a means of interaction with other individuals, cannot be detached from its sociocultural characteristics. To the respect,each society establishes rules, which include the forms of treatment that sanction the conduct of communicative behaviors as being adequate or inadequate. The way we treat others is embedded in a social code that, when transgressed, can cause damage in the relationship between the interlocutors. Specifically, forms of treatment designate both the terms that refer to the speaker-hearer pair, as the vocatives used to draw the attention of the recipient, including the so-called personal pronouns of treatment as well as the nominal forms. The purpose of this work is to make considerations about the forms of treatment in Brazilian Portuguese and Iberian Spanish; present theories that address the subject of courtesy; and finally, on the basis of data obtained from two works of Brazilian theater of the 20th century, analyze and compare the pragmatic strategies developed through the forms of treatment in both Brazilian Portuguese and Iberian Spanish. With this study we also intend to offer teachers of foreign language some appreciation of the difficulties,  pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic, that in the process of acquisition/learning of the forms of treatment may occur due to the influence of the mother tongue.

The paper focuses on how nonnative teachers of a target language (NNTs) deal with pragmatics in their classes. It starts with a discussion of what pragmatics entails. Next, issues relating to the teaching of pragmatics are identified, such as the language background of the teacher, comparisons between second- (L2) and foreign-language (FL) instruction, and the potential role of digital media and other means in providing models for pragmatic behavior. Then, an international survey is presented which probed into the experiences of NNTs of various languages while teaching the pragmatics of their language of instruction. A total of 113 teachers were asked to indicate what they taught with regard to pragmatics, 30 native-language teachers (NTs) and 83 NNTs. They were also asked to report on their experience as teachers of L2 and FL pragmatics (e.g., if they encountered classroom moments when they did not feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, what they did about it). Since pragmatics is a meeting of language and culture, the teacher respondents were asked to assess their knowledge regarding pragmalinguistics (i.e., the language forms) and sociopragmatics (sociocultural knowledge). In addition, they were asked to give their opinion regarding similarities and differences between the teaching of FL as opposed to L2 pragmatics, as this traditional dichotomy gives way to a more hybrid reality in an increasingly globalized world. Similarly, they were asked about their methods for teaching pragmatics (e.g., their use of digital media and their handling of dialect differences). Finally, they were asked to suggest areas in which they would like to see research conducted that would inform the teaching of pragmatics. The paper reports the findings from the study, including statistical differences in reported teaching of criticism, sarcasm, and cursing, as well as in the use of digital media and in having students gather data on pragmatics.

In this article, we argue that humor, namely in jokes, helps teaching Spanish to Brazilian students. Therefore, we show some arguments establishing how humor is important for teaching and learning. Then, we show how relevance theory (SPERBER; WILSON, 1986, 1995) can help us to understand how people understand jokes. Next, we argue that the teacher must to anticipate possible student’s translations in order to use jokes appropriately in class. Finally, we analyze three jokes based on the Yus’ (2010) classification. We conclude that the students will comprehend more easily transferable jokes than replaceable and the challenging ones.

Phenomenon known for its ambivalent behavior, presupposition has been challenging some generations of linguists regarding two complementary problems: the presupposition projection problem and the problem about the source of presuppositions. Although the descriptive problem has received more attention, it is impossible to cope with it without assuming some position regarding the explanatory problem, associated to the source of presuppositional inferences. The noticeable divergence related to the presupposition projection descriptions is in contrast, however, to a certain consensus, historically built, about the nature of presuppositions. According to this consensus, presupposition is a conventional phenomenon, affected only in its projection by conversational linguistic aspects. Recently, that consensus has been shaken by a new wave of researches that, in different ways, has started to advocate the idea that presupposition is a phenomenon essentially conversational. Among those proposals, it deserves attention for its plausibility the one that associate presupposition to scalar quantity implicature. Both forms to take into account presuppositions, nevertheless, allow different predictions regarding their processing patterns. Focused on the confirmation of one of these hypothesis, some experimental studies had been carried out in order to assess how presuppositions and scalars implicatures are processed. The results obtained have been an important part in the discussion about the explanatory problem of presuppositions. This article revisits some experiments that explore the processing of presuppositions and scalar implicatures, and try to appreciate the importance, in the general context of the debate, of the works which investigate the way subjects in the acquisition stage process pragmatic inferences. What it shows is that the evidences obtained may be seen as supporting some models or, alternatively, as clues aimed to the improvement of the models which they, at a first glance, seems to falsify.

This article exposes the effects of the explicit instruction on total interrogative and affirmative statements in Spanish as L2. It also displays their possible interactions with individual variables, such as the attention capacity, the frequency of use and also the linguistic and teaching experience. It is a quantitative study which covers some linguistic tests of perception and the production of sentences, an attention network test and a questionnaire of historical and linguistic proficiency. The study had a convenience sample covering both an experimental group that received some explicit instructions about a target content in an intermediate period between the pre- and the post-test, and a control group that did not receive the instruction. The results have shown that there was no significant difference related to the instructional effect. Our hypothesis is that individual variables may have minimized the instruction role about intonation in the performance of these participants.

There are already a bulk of studies addressing idiom comprehension. However, developmental studies testing idiom comprehension in Portuguese are rare. This paper aims at presenting the results of an idiom comprehension task with 270 participants in three age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The task consists of six items: sentences followed by an open-ended question and a dichotomous one. A comparison between the three groups indicates a gradual increase in idiom comprehension. Besides age, linguistic variables such as context, transparency, metaphoricity and familiarity in the comprehension of idioms are discussed. The analyses suggest that this complex phenomenon should be studied considering all those aspects.

The objective is to discuss the notions of datum and analysis when the theory in question is an enunciative one, bearing in mind two central questions: if the several enunciative theories question language through a semantic point of view, aiming at studying what is singular in the speech of each speaker, how can an enunciative study be based on a corpus and, even more, constitute a database? Are enunciative studies not refractory, in a certain way, to the notion of linguistic study based on corpora? In order to answer these two questions, we present the example of a database of language disorders, ENUNSIL (Banco de Dados Enunciação e SIntoma na Linguagem), considering that, if the notion of datum is problematic to enunciative studies, such difficulties augment exponentially when symptomatic speech is at stake.

This article is related to the biographical practice subject. The project Cyro Martins – the decisive years (1908-1951) is developed in the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, in Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, in the area of Theory of Literature, since the year 2014. In “The biographical attempt”: the challenge of writing part of the life of Cyro Martins, the origins of the work are clarified, the relationship between biographer and biographer is highlighted, the research spaces and biographer's choices are evidenced. In addition, texts of some scholars of the biography are recovered (Leon Edel, François Dosse, Anna Caballé) and the organization of the biographical attempt Cyro Martins – the decisive years (1908-1951) is presented.

---

The article examines the fictional narrative of the Venezuelan Otero Silva. In his novels, except for the last two, the author created a kind of sociopolitical map of the contemporary history of Venezuela, using as narrative material both events he has lived and those he has been an indirect witness. It is a committed writing, historical in nature, that draws in each of the novels a stage of national development and constantly seeks formal renewal.

---

Whereas Galdós never wrote the episode programmed Las Colonias perdidas, the reference to them and their meaning for Spanish society of the 19th century are present in the course of the Episodios nacionales as shown in this article that, in addition to signaling its location in a way, reflects on Galdós' critical view of the way in which his contemporaries and 18th century Spanish politicians perceived the colonies at the historical moment of the end of the Spanish colonial empire.

Julio Cortázar, argentine writer and intellectual, was born at the Embassy of Argentine in Brussels on August 26, 1914, and died in Paris on February 12, 1984. His production includes poetry, short stories, essays, novels, interviews, songs and a vast correspondence. Following a systematic reading of his work, it is possible to perceive the  nterconnections between the writer’s process of creation and the job of translator that he practiced throughout his life. The present work, in this sense, seeks to highlight the importance of the translation for the writer Julio Cortázar through an analysis of his own work, interviews, especially those that were granted to Harss (2012), Prego Gadea (1985), González Bermejo (2002) and Picón Garfield (1996), as well as through other critical and biographical texts, namely those by Herráez (2011), Goloboff (1998) and Maturo (2004). As a methodological instrument, we have selected references to literary translations, to the translation or to the job of translator and to texts in which we find Cortázar’s opinion on the translation practice, relating them to each other, since they seem to be part of what could be called “constellation of figures” that intertwine. The results point to the realization of the total relevance of the translation practice in the writer’s life and work.

Based on the perception defended by Bernd (2012) that transcultural mobilities exert a significant influence on literary practices, this paper seeks to highlight the role played by the writer Josefina Plá (1903-1999) in the Paraguayan literary system, describing its importance in the conformation of contemporary narrative of this literary community. Through the analysis of the short story Sesenta listas (1981), it seeks to explore the transcultural / phagocytic power of Josefina Plá's narratives, at the same time as the violence engendered by coloniality in the cultural community of the South Atlantic.

After having served as the main conduct for the transmission of thought and the circulation of literary texts during all the modern age, magazines are  eing threatened by the Internet empire. This article checks some moments in which text production, authors, cultural assets and readers are built up from journalism and the cultural (mostly literary) magazine, out of several Latin American examples, so as to make some propositions concerning the possibilities of the present.

Cordel’s movies and literature presents the Northeast as a myth fair with sui generis caracteristics in terms of folk culture. The imaginary which surrounds the region constitutes the Northeast as being the land of the legends, of the cangaceiros, of the jagunços, of the cowboys and religious leaders. From this point of view, the Northeast can be seen as an discursiveimagetic construction where the most diverse myths are spread, myths that are, typically, heroic generated in a marginalized socioeconomic group, of earth attached proletarians. In this scenario, two fundamental characters constantly appear in folk stories: the cangaceiro and the saint figures, the beatified and charismatic religious leaders. Inside the corpus, there’s an investigation on how the creation process happens for this mythical characters as well as their function as from the discursive-imagetic universe of movies and literature.

This article has as objective to analyse the ethos of two pages created on Facebook: Caneta desmanipuladora and Caneta desesquerdizadora, in the intention of investigating how they create an image of themselves from enunciations published in their timelines. For the realization of this study, we take as theoretical support the studies of the Discourse Analysis of French line, specially, the concept of ethos worked by Maingueneau, as well as the Facebook exam undertaken by Emediato. Methodologically, this study is registered in an interpretativedescriptive slant of qualitative hallmark. As result, we check, on basis of the analysis of the corpus, as two enunciators, which, a priori, group together, can create images of themselves distinct from the discursive ethos.