Linguística: Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto

The Grammaticalization of 'a gente' in European Portuguese: a corpus-based study

Ana Filipa Fonseca — 2024-12-23

This article intends to study the process of the grammaticalization of a gente which took place between the 13th and the 20th centuries (Lopes, 2004), comparing the different uses of the initial phase of grammaticalization, corresponding to the medieval period, and of the final phase (in the 19th and 20th centuries). To this end, a corpus was constituted composed of 156 excerpts extracted from the Computerized Corpus of Medieval Portuguese (CIPM) and the Corpus of Portuguese (CP) – subdivided into CP-Fiction and CP-News. In general, the results obtained corroborate conclusions already reached in other works on this evolutionary process (Nascimento, 1989; Menuzzi, 2000; Lopes, 2004; Costa & Pereira, 2013). However, we discovered some relevant aspects for this research: the use of a syntactic-semantic test to identify a gente with a semantic feature [φI], the impact of regency on verbal agreement and the relationship between the uses and functioning of a gente within the various discursive traditions in which it arises. CP-News data confirm the characteristic tension of journalistic discourse between objectivity and approach to the reader, as the frequencies of the interpretations under analysis are very close (43,6.0% vs. 56,4%) and we even found a verb form in the first-person plural which agrees with a gente.

The impact of corrective feedback on EFL learners’ acquisition of regular and irregular past simple forms: evidence from a Portuguese context using a picture description task

Ana Rita Faustino — 2024-12-23

Corrective Feedback (CF) is a common practice in the foreign language classroom and constitutes a topic of interest for both language teachers – who have to decide whether to correct their students, when and how – and for L2 researchers – who are interested in testing the efficacy of CF techniques in L2 acquisition. Conducted in a state school in Portugal, this quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of three CF strategies – recasts, prompts and explicit correction – and of no feedback on the acquisition of English regular and irregular past tense forms. 166 9^th-grade Portuguese students (and their five teachers) took part in the study and were tested in a pretest-posttest design. Comparisons of group means using ANOVA revealed a significant effect for test time. Post-hoc analyses revealed that the Prompt group significantly outperformed both the Explicit Correction group and the Recast group in the production of regular past tense items and showed significant improvement between the Pretest and Posttest 2 in the use of irregular past tense.

Case study: teachers of German as a foreign language at Portuguese universities - drivers of digital education in times of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond

Anette Kind — 2024-12-23

The Covid-19 pandemic has given a huge boost to the digitalization of university teaching. A central challenge was the ad hoc conversion and adaptation of face-to-face teaching scenarios to digital teaching formats, while respecting the guidelines of both the ministry and the universities. During this transition, lecturers took on a high level of responsibility, as they had to make autonomous didactic decisions in the implementation of digital teaching. This paper focuses on the role of teachers as the driving force behind the digitization of teaching German as a foreign language in Portuguese universities in the context of the pandemic. The data obtained through the qualitative study presented here allowed us to analyze the experiences of teachers and students of German as a foreign language during the pandemic. We conclude that, despite the rapid availability of training courses dedicated to the use of digital tools by universities and the commitment of teachers and students, digital teaching requires not only technical prerequisites and digital skills, but above all a digital didactic specifically orientated towards the teaching of foreign languages in the university context. In the near future, filling this gap will be a central challenge in the process of defining appropriate strategies for digital language teaching.

The years of mechanization (1940-1980): a history of Machine Translation

Ronaldo de Oliveira Batista — 2024-12-23

We sketched the history of machine translation (MT) from the 1940s to the 1980s from a linguistic historiography perspective and the concept of research programs. For this purpose, two questions were established according to the selected historical period: (1) What are the characteristics and the use of technological tools? (2) What are the impacts such changes have on social contexts of use in relation to the performance of human translators? The methodological direction adopted to demonstrate the results in this article was established into three phases: 1st. heuristic phase: periodization definition; selection/treatment of corpus; 2nd. hermeneutic phase: guidelines establishment for the analysis; 3rd. expository phase: results presentation through a historiographical narrative. The analysis material was organized and hierarchized into two large sets: documents regarding functionalities and tools and documents in connection with the history of MT. This article argues that for about 40 years, the MT was characterized by initiatives and operations of a mechanization program that began to change the translator's profile and professional insertion.

Preposition: an intermediate category in the continuum lexicon > grammar

Sueli Maria Coelho — 2024-12-23

From a cognitivist and multisystemic perspective on the conception of language, this article revisits the class of prepositions in Portuguese, re-discussing their concept and their traditional categorization in terms of form and function. The core of the discussion consists of a proposal to categorize the eleven most productive essential prepositions in Portuguese according to the prototype of the items, defined based on a matrix of features that combines categorical criteria (degree of grammaticalization), syntactic (transitivity potential) and cognitive (representation concrete and metaphorical space). In this analysis methodology, the most prototypical examples of the class are those that combine the greatest number of features in the matrix, while the most peripheral are those that present fewer features that define the category. The results obtained indicate a specialization in the use of the most peripheral exemplars in the affix function.

Interrogative clauses with qual 'which': grammatical analysis, and variation between European and Brazilian Portuguese

Telmo Móia — 2024-12-23

This paper discusses the distribution of the interrogative morpheme qual ’which’ in direct and indirect questions, considering four main types of syntactic contexts: equative predications (qual [ser NP] ‘which [be NP]’), partitive constructions (qual de NP ‘which of NP’), constructions with adnominal qual (qual N¢ ‘which N¢’), and constructions with qual combined with null nominal forms (qual []_N_¢/deNP ‘which []_N_¢/ofNP’). The prevalence of each construction and of additional grammatical phenomena, such as sluicing, insertion of é que and omission of the second NP in equative constructions, is evaluated using data from extensive corpora of newspaper texts. Aspects of the variation between European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are also explored in some detail; these involve mainly the use of adnominal qual, a form that is extremely frequent in BP and almost residual in EP, except in direct questions superficially coinciding with the interrogative constituent. The role of three grammatical factors that seem to favour the use of adnominal qual in contemporary EP is also assessed: presence of prepositions in the interrogative constituent, spelling out of alternative answers, and establishment of anaphoric links with preceding nominal expressions. The analyses take into account data from Portuguese literary texts from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The competition between the equivalent forms qual N¢ and que N¢ in Brazilian Portuguese is also briefly examined.

Analyzing GPT-4 misinterpretations of russian grammatical constructions

Timofei Plotnikov — 2024-12-23

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs), which are Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily trained on datasets dominated by English texts, can incorporate inaccuracies into their final outputs. The training data bias presents challenges for accurate performance in non-Roman script languages, such as Russian. Challenges are specifically expected with grammatical constructions in Russian which are colloquial, idiomatic, and non-compositional. Although the empirical investigation reveals that, overall, GPT-4 performs well with the majority of Russian grammatical constructions, it still encounters limitations with low-frequency constructions due to insufficient training data, a lack of context, and the influence of the English language.

Editorial space

2024-12-23

Cover

2024-12-23

Oswald Ducrot (27/11/1930 – 08/06/2024)

Isabel Margarida Duarte — 2024-12-23

Teresa Brocardo in memoriam (1959-2023)

Isabel Margarida Duarte — 2024-12-23

Full issue

2024-12-23