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This paper proposes a reflection on the role of Latin in legal practices and legal culture. Specifically, this work argues that a proper understanding of the role of Latin in the legal world requires more attention regarding what this language brings to that field. To suit this, this study sheds some light on the historical-linguistic nature of the so-called “legal Latin” and also on the proliferation of glossaries and manuals of this modality of Latin that do not contain linguistic and historical-cultural reflections. Secondly, this paper calls into attention the importance of understanding Latin through the Latin language, especially for a less shallow understanding of the bases of Roman Law and the Legal History. Furthermore, this work highlights the linguistic character of Latin in terms of both the production of utterances and their comprehension through explicit linguistic reflection. Lastly, it draws attention to the importance of the Latin language and the Roman culture for the intellectual and academic training of jurists and lawyers.

This paper presents a socio-cognitive approach of the referentiation process, in order to check to what extent and in which way the strategies adopted in the treatment of the lexicon in the literacy process can be updated, or even confirmed, in reading or in writing. Studies on how words are stored in the user memory and on how they are accessed - while language is being used - represent a great advance in understanding the literacy process, especially for psycholinguistics research. Besides, this paper highlights the prototypical notion of categorization treated in the cognitive studies as well as the notion of exemplar representation in the socio-cognitive area, which is based on the experience of culturally-situated speakers. A practical approach of these studies to the literacy process is demonstrated in this paper, taking into consideration prefabs in the referentiation operation.

The paper discusses three aspects in New Literacies Studies research in Brazil, as developed by researchers from an Applied Linguistics perspective. This perspective contributes to determine epistemological, theoretical, and methodological issues in literacy research, as well as ethical issues in regard to the relationships established with the groups who participate in the research. Taking examples from our research group, known as Teacher Literacy Research Group (created in 1991), we discuss transdisciplinary relationships built between Literacy and Dialogism as developed by Bakhtin and his Circle. Another intersecting point between Applied Linguistics and Literacy Research discussed in the paper is the relation between ethics and research in the two fields; a third one has to do with the methods adopted: as in several other studies in Applied Linguistics, in literacy studies, ethnography has been the preferred methodology. We conclude pointing out that an approach that conceives its object in a transdisciplinary manner and adopts ethical criteria as a research validation element favors the development of critical studies about writing in which the choice of problems and research contexts support the social goals of the investigated groups.

This paper deals with the recall of classical rhetoric elements in Aristotle and Quintilian’s doings, highlighting the enthymeme as well as the use of these elements as necessary knowledge for teaching and improving post graduate student argumentative writing in the production of a specific genre: the reader’s letter. The methodology used in this paper was qualitative, with the purpose of building a tool for the analysis of argumentative letters produced in an experiment that took place in a post graduate course. Among the letters produced by twelve postgraduate students, it was sellected the ones written by a master’s degree student in Psychology as an illustration of the instrument. Accordingly, this student was introduced to the classical rhetoric elements, as well as the arrangement and operation in the production of these kind in question, starting from the entimema as a central element. Simultaneously, specimens of the genre reader’s letter sent to the Carta Capital magazine, were analyzed to recognize in them the presence of these elements and to analyze how they combine and contribute to the making of the objective, clear and persuasive argumentative text. At the end of each meeting, from reading the magazine subjects, the student went on to produce similar letters to those sent to the reader’s section, with the purpose of employing the elements reconvened seen so far. This experience has shown that the use of these elements was able to contribute to improving this student practice of argumentative writing.

This article has two main purposes. The first is to provide a short panorama of existing trends within computer-assisted stylistics. The second is to analyse a prize winning novel by English writer Julian Barnes, by resorting to the tenets and working tools of one of the newest branch of Stylistics, the so-called Corpus stylistics. To this end, the article starts by looking at various attempts at defining what style is and their implications to the definition of the discipline known as Stylistics. Then the paper presents recent work within the field of Corpus stylistics, as it describes the uses of computational tools as part of the stylistician tool kit. Finally, the paper provides a variety of ways with which a literary work may be approached digitally with a view to showing how computational tools can aid the stylistician in acts of interpretation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ UM BREVE GUIA PARA A ESTILÍSTICA DE CORPUS Este artigo tem duplo objetivo. Por um lado, apresenta um breve panorama de tendências no âmbito da Estilística assistida por instrumentos computacionais. Por outro, introduz estudo de um romance premiado do escritor inglês Julian Barnes, com base nos princípios e nos instrumentos analíticos de uma das mais novas áreas da Estilística, a chamada Estilística de corpus. Para tal, o artigo inicia pelo levantamento de diferentes concepções de estilo e suas implicações para a definição da disciplina conhecida como Estilística. Em seguida, o artigo apresenta pesquisa recente na área da Estilística de corpus, ao descrever as ferramentas computacionais que fazem parte da bagagem de trabalho do pesquisador na área da Estilística. Ao fim, o artigo introduz maneiras de abordar a obra literária digitalmente, com o objetivo de demonstrar como as ferramentas computacionais podem ajudar o pesquisador na área da Estilística em atos de interpretação. --- Artigo em inglês

In this paper, the question of authorship, that has been dealt with before in “Indícios de autoria” (POSSENTI, 2002), is taken up again. The purpose of the paper is to put forward new dimensions of the concept of authorship, including those related to the notions of style and writing in a school setting.

Through the analysis of reports on sorrow and pain, this paper attempts to investigate how speakers find relief and internal resources to reconstruct their lives by means of a narrative. The proposed reflections derive from two correlated experiences: (i) the observation of the speeches of mothers and fathers who belong to a group that supports grieving parents (speeches that promoted a favorable development of the mourning period); and (ii) the fact that the researcher herself had the opportunity to participate as the co-author of an unusual story: one involving a transsexual who underwent sex reassignment surgery and later wrote about the experience in order to transform pain into narrative. In the two cases, curative effects were noticed as well as identity empowerment, both stemming from the process of narrativization of pain. The peculiarities of such textual construction co-operate to put the notions of authorship and style into question, the definitions of which are located between a conventional way of understanding these notions (related to an autonomist conception of the language subject) and a discursive way (related to a social and historical conception of the subject). We made use of reflections proposed by Possenti (1988, 2009, 2012), who draws on the notion of author, according to Foucault (1969), and questions the notion of style. The perspective that runs through all the parts of the reflection in this paper is Pragmatics, which understands language as being performative (AUSTIN: 1975) and a place of excellence for the construction of identity (RAJAGOPALAN: 2003, 2006). From a narrative construction standpoint, this paper takes the reflections of Paul Ricoeur (2010) mostly into account.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of Corpus Linguistics, characterizing it as an area of research, considering its relations with other areas of study and illustrating its applications with specific focus on Brazilian Portuguese. In order to develop these topics, this research paper discusses Corpus Linguistics characteristics by pointing out some issues that distinguish it from other areas of research, such as: (1) its specific way to define language as well as a particular form to do empirical research on the basis of evidence extracted from linguistic corpora, using computational tools; (2) the possibility to generate theoretical contributions through new descriptions of different language uses; (3) the interfaces it establishes with Systemic- Functional Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Computational Linguistics; (4) the expansion of the area in many countries, including Brazil, due to new perspectives opened in several fields, such as, lexicography, lexicogrammatical studies, genre and language variation studies as well as cross-cultural studies. The discussion of the topics above should reinforce the argument that Corpus Linguistics cannot be considered only as a methodological approach, but rather as a research area that allows for empirical linguistic knowledge, leading into new theoretical insights about language. In order to illustrate some corpus research done within the scope of Corpus Linguistics using data from the Portuguese language, three empirical studies are briefly described at the end of this paper. These academic works used data from the CORPOBRAS PUC-Rio, a corpus compiled with the purpose of representing Brazilian Portuguese.

Perhaps some of the most significant investigations in contemporary literature and art from Brazil revolve around the question of temporality, the threshold between the living and the dead and the ways in which conflicting temporalities and anachronism articulate a critique of the present. In this context, Nuno Ramos’ installations and writings, working on the unstable terrain between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the fossilized and the spectral, represent a decisive intervention. In Ramos’ works memory is never entirely human; it is irreducible to the domain of subjectivity nor to the shared narratives of the collective. From books such as Cujo or Junco to the the fossilized matter present in many of his works, the relationship between life and death is both political, technological and non-anthropomorphic — it is, in other words, biopolitical. This paper analyzes the ways in which the configuration of such critical perspective in Nuno Ramos’ work interrogates and reformulates the ways in which temporality and the political interface there where the very notion of life — the bios that articulates the biopolitical— is at stake. --- Original in Spanish.

The mythic Nzinga Mbandi, or Queen Ginga, was the leader of a huge territory in 18th century. A large amount of the slaves who came to Brazil are from the Bantu region – dominated by Ginga then. Her story is as glorious as the history of Africa. Not by coincidence a large amount of historians study her, as well as hundreds of writers have already narrated and sung her milestones. For this analysis, three authors were chosen: Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa and his historic novel A Rainha Ginga: e de como os africanos inventaram o mundo (2014); Brazilian Alberto Mussa and his detective novel O trono da Rainha Jinga, (1999); and the Portuguese rooted in Angola, Eugénia Neto, and her poem “Poema à Mãe Angolana”, released in 1976, in the background of the war for Independence in Angola. Two movements were outlined here: first, it was historically described the figure of the Queen so secondly we could sketch the clippings of the texts. Both Agualusa and Mussa tend to show the power of Queen represented by her “male” force, once she takes leadership in a context of patriarchal lineage. Nevertheless, Eugénia Neto humanizes the figure of Nzinga as the big “Mother of Angola”, marking her female characteristics. Independently of the judgment, this paper aims to notice how authors from distinct nationalities and genders do construct the image of the African ruler, mixing history and fiction in a fertile ballet of epic and poetic dimensions.

This paper analyzes the construction of the mode system in texts of report and sentence genres, produced by first semester students of law in a private faculty in Brasilia. The aim is to discuss the importance of interpersonal metafunction so that students understand how language shows social roles and identities, especially in the field of Law. To reach this goal, the choice of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (HALLIDAY & MATTHIESSEN, 2014; FUZER & CABRAL, 2010; NEVES, 2007; VIAN JR, 2009 and SILVA, 2010) as the theoretical framework adopted in this research is justified. Then, according to this theory, the MODE system is defined, as well as the elements that constitute it (mode (finite + Subject) and residue (preacher + complement + adjunct)), and the discussion of modality is related to discursive genres (SILVA, 2010). In sequence, the development of the activity of writing in the classroom is contextualized, as well as the formation of the corpus. For the analysis of the results, these are crossed with the theoretical assumptions previously presented. The data showed that students, even before having theoretical explanations about the genres in question, have prior knowledge about interpersonal relations in these genres, especially in the sentence, where it is possible to better define the main actant: the judge. These results confirm the need to explore lexical-grammatical aspects linked to the production conditions of the genres in the classroom, as well as they suggest that the interpersonal metafunction can be a kick-start to discuss social roles with students who are starting their studies in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and reflect on Franz Kafka’s The Castle (2010), the intersection between the problem of the crisis of tradition, raised by Walter Benjamin (1987) and Gershom Scholem (1999), and its development in the dialectic of the Jewish mysticism, especially in the antinomian movements that emerged from heretical Kabbalah and constituted Messianic nihilism. The journey of the character of The Castle, rather than intriguing peripécies, develops, in a parody, an exegetical exercise proper to the Jewish tradition (BLANCHOT, 2002). The Castle, an object devoid of substance, surrounds itself with infinite comments, forming a veritable labyrinth of words. Only in his commentaries, the Castle resembles the Name of God speculated by the Jewish Kabbalists. For heretical Kabbalah, God is inseparable from his revealed word, the Torah, so that his Name is infinitely interpretable. We intend to demonstrate that the relationship between the characters and the comments about the Castle, twisted and desecrated as the Name of God among the Kabbalists, makes Kafka a writer who masterfully explored the boundaries between religion and nihilism.

The majority of studies dealing with the prosodic template of first words in the past decades found a trochaic (strong-weak) tendency across languages. One line of explanation for this tendency is that trochees result from a left default value for the parameter nucleus of the foot (e.g. DRESHER 1992, FIKKERT 1994). However, as most of these studies discussed languages that are trochaic in adult form (e.g. English, Dutch), it is difficult to tease apart if the early trochees are due to this default value or if they just reflect the pattern of the target language. Furthermore, some studies have shown that is not the case that children always present a trochaic tendency (e.g. DEMUTH 1996). In this regard, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) becomes a very interesting language to analyze. On the one hand, it has more trochees than iambs (weak-strong) in adult speech. On the other hand, children begin producing more iambs than trochees (e.g. SANTOS 2001, 2007, BONILHA 2005, BAIA 2008). One could claim that this unexpected iambic tendency in early BP is consistent with the frequency of multisyllabic words in the ambient language (e.g. KEHOE 1999, ROARK & DEMUTH 2000, PRIETO 2006). In this paper we put this alternative explanation to test, by analyzing data from 2 BP speaking children (from 1;3 to 3;6 years old) and their caretakers. If this child directed speech (FDC) approach is correct, we should expect to find more iambs than trochees in FDC, given that previous analyses of BP speaking children’s data found an iambic tendency. The results show that FDC actually has a different distributional pattern than adult language, but trochees still outnumber iambs. Furthermore, children’s production has a different pattern than CDS. Therefore, FDC cannot explain the early prosodic patterns of BP either. Additionally, the results showed that children are not avoiding any specific prosodic pattern in their selection. Moreover, it is also not the case that children avoid some patterns in their production. In conclusion, our results clearly discard the hypotheses that children’s initial prosodic patterns reflect FDC’s distributional patterns. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.28708

This paper examined the production of unstressed vowels by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) learners of English. More specifically, the aim was to examine the acoustic characteristics of the interlanguage unstressed vowels and to determine whether the language learners’ stress assignment in cognate words was target-like or not. The participants were 20 L1 BP learners of English and two native English speakers who provided the baseline data. Participants read lists of sentences including polysyllabic cognate words with the neutral suffixes “-able” and “-al” (e.g. ‘respectable’, ‘radical’). Participants’ productions were acoustically and auditorily analysed and the F1, F2 and duration values measured. The results showed that the L1 BP participants produced a reduced vowel /ə/ with similar acoustic characteristics to the L1 English speakers, differentiating it from /ʌ/ in terms of vowel quality and duration. Despite being able to distinguish between the unstressed and the stressed central vowels, the correct assignment of stress in polysyllabic cognates was challenging for the L1 BP informants. A possible explanation for the non-target-like stress assignment is negative transfer from the L1, in which one of the target suffixes, “-al” (e.g. ‘tropical’), attracts stress, contrary to the L2. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A ACENTUAÇÃO TÔNICA E A PRODUÇÃO DA VOGAL ÁTONA EM SUFIXOS NEUTROS DO INGLÊS POR APRENDIZES BRASILEIROS O presente estudo investigou a produção de vogais átonas por aprendizes brasileiros de inglês. O objetivo principal foi examinar as características dessas vogais entre as duas línguas em contato e determinar se os aprendizes atribuíam acento tônico adequadamente. Os participantes foram 20 alunos brasileiros de inglês e dois falantes nativos que forneceram dados de base. Os participantes leram listas de frases incluindo palavras polissilábicas cognatas com os sufixos neutros “-able” e “-al” (por exemplo, “respectable”, “radical”). As produções dos participantes foram analisadas acústica e auditivamente e os valores de F1, F2 e duração das vogais átonas foram medidos. Os resultados mostraram que os participantes brasileiros produziram a vogal /ə/ com características acústicas similares aos falantes nativos de inglês, diferenciando-a de /ʌ/ em termos de qualidade e duração da vogal. Apesar de serem capazes de distinguir as vogais centrais átona e tônica, a atribuição correta do acento tônico em cognatos polissilábicos foi desafiadora para os informantes brasileiros. Uma possível explicação para a atribuição inconsistente do acento tônico é a influência do português brasileiro, em que um dos sufixos alvo, “-al” (por exemplo, “tropical”), atrai a tonicidade, ao contrário do que tipicamente ocorre no inglês. --- Artigo em inglês. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.28601

This paper proposes a theoretical intersection that brings together concepts from two important fields of policy research: public policies and language policies. Language Policy is connected to approaches that involve decisions about the domain of language and society, and officiality is not necessarily required here (HAUGEN, 1959; CALVET 1996, 1997, 1999, 2002a, 2002b; COOPER, 1997; BLANCHET, 2014; ROBILLARD, 1997; BOYER, 1996; CHAUDENSON, 1996; SOUZA, 2013). Researches about public policies cover studies over sectors of the economy, of public administration, health, environment, etc., if they are formalized through laws and governmental decrees (SOUZA, 2012; AZEVEDO, 1997; OZGA 2000; MAINARDES, 2006; MACHADO, 2012; FREY, 2000). Thus, we argue that both theoretical perspectives are connected, interacting with each other. --- http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2016.21466

In this paper, we aim to present the process of texts construction during a knowledge internationalization project conceived of for high-school students from a technological school. It is a case study guided by the theory of language education policies, which focuses on the teacher's role as an agent of the school micro context (MENKEN; GARCÍA, 2010) and the Policy Cycle method of analysis (BALL; BOWE, 1992). The results show how language policies (collective actions, dynamic and conflicting) may be headed and led by a teacher, who is hierarchically inferior to her interlocutors in terms of institutional position. --- http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2016.20778

This article assumes Glottopolitics as the study of the interventions in the space of language, which participate in the replication or transformation of societies. Just as these interventions depend on social processes, they also influence them from certain positions, which this analysis aims at identifying. Linguistic instruments, which regulate these practices, are considered glottopolitical gestures, and that is the reason why the conditions under which they are produced and circulate should be investigated. Within this framework and with special reference to grammars and rhetorics, this paper focuses on theoretical aspects such as the relationship between Glottopolitics and Linguistic Historiography, the temporalities which may be identified in the analysis and the spaces considered, the importance of intertext for interpretation, the social function of normative devices, and the construction of subjectivities, as well as on methodological aspects, such as the construction of series, the contrastive analysis of texts and reformulation. --- Original in Spanish. --- http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2016.20196

Based on the assumption that songs are a speech genre consisting of both music and lyrics (COSTA, 2002; COELHO DE SOUZA, 2010; CARETTA, 2011) and that, consequently, its meanings derive from the articulation between both languages, this paper aims to introduce the concept of literomusical literacy, i.e., the literacy involved in social practices mediated by songs and verbo-musical genres. Grounded on the concept of literacy as social practices mediated by written language (STREET, 1984, 2006; KLEIMAN, 1995; SOARES, 1999, 2002; BARTON, 2007) and bringing contributions from studies on literary literacy (PAULINO, 2004; COSSON, 2006; PAULINO; COSSON, 2009) and music education (SWANWICK, 1994, 2003; FRANÇA; SWANWICK, 2002), literomusical literacy is conceived as the state or condition of those who participate in social practices mediated by songs and discourses that emerge from songs and take a critical stand on them because they are able to understand and reflect upon their verbal and musical components, on how they articulate to build certain meaning effects and on how they relate to their musical community. This involves, for instance, recognizing and interpreting the actions that are being mediated by songs, and through this interpretation, to be able to understand the values underlying them and the target interlocutors. Acknowledging the existence of a particular literacy involved in the social practices mediated by verbo-musical genres entails reflecting on the pedagogical practices associated with the use of songs in language teaching and how to turn these literacy practices into literomusical literacy practices.

In this paper we present theoretical insights about the literacy practice of bibliographic review by undergraduate and graduate students, thought as a kind of reading comprehension. Our focus is on the implications of the Internet as a source for research and its relations with the literacy development. We also propose some parameters for improving this literacy activity. We follow the works of Cerutti-Rizzatti, Kleiman, Gasque e Soares on the concept of literacy; however, we reject the plural form of the term. For the reading comprehension background, we use the Vergnano-Junger’s multidirectional perspective. We advocate that literacy activities in the university setting challenge the students and demand specific learning processes that must be included in the academic curricula. The Internet is an important resource for carrying on researches and bibliographic reviews. Nevertheless, because of the virtual environment characteristics, these activities demand the ability to selecting, comparing, organizing, and criticizing that adds up to other abilities, strategies and knowledge already required by printed materials. We acknowledge that this systematic approach to reading comprehension and bibliographic review is seldom regarded in the academic curricula. Furthermore, it is even more rare the Internet to be regarded as a resource. Finally, we conclude that this reality is probably related to the transition moment that we live in regards to our relations with the information and communication technology and the practices that they establish.

The aim of this paper is to pose a reflection on explicit or underlying literacy practices in a literacy event such as the Brazilian university entrance exams (vestibular) using, as an object of study, the essays written during that event. We aim to understand the educated writing culture, or Brazilian literacy, in its very extreme, that is, the end of High School, based on Bakhtin’s theory of enunciation. Despite pedagogical measures focused on elaborate (argumentative) writing in view of college assessment exams and ENEM (National High School Exam), we know how unsatisfactory its results still are, in terms of the school literacy practices, which still remains to be sufficiently reflected on. It is also worth highlighting that we understand writing (school writing) more as a set of social practices than as a set of skills alone.

This paper aims at presenting a stylistic and discursive analysis of three sonnets by Augusto dos Anjos — “A Ideia”, “Psicologia de um vencido” and “Vencedor” — evidencing the ethos of the poetic speaker. It intends to understand the relationship between these poems and the context in which they were written, highlighting the elements of subjectivity, meaning and expressiveness.

One of the most common criticisms against Saussure’s theory claims that it negates the historicity of language; language is allegedly thought of as an object without historical dimension, considered as a self-sufficient system. This text aims at showing that this conclusion is founded on a poor reading of the Course in General Linguistics. What Saussure does in his theory of sign is to radically separate language from reality. He posits that the organization of reality is different from the organization of language, because language is not a reflex of the reality, but a human creation. As such, it is radically historical. History is integrated into Saussure’s theory by means of the concept of value; in other words, under the primacy of form. This paper shows what it means to analyze language historicity under the primacy of form.

This paper aims at demonstrating how the barbarolexis, whose doctrine can be traced back to Aristotle, is ingeniously employed in 17th century City of Bahia by the poet Gregório de Matos e Guerra to represent vulgar éthe whose character is evicend by their faulty speech. In the poem chosen by us as object of analysis the poet composes a mixture of African, Indian and Portuguese words, a monstrous lexis which present a very low perspicuitas or intelligibility, effect searched artistically, because it is the evidence of the barbarian character of the utterer. The amass of barbarian words contributes to the exponential power of the phone, main object of representation by the poet.

This paper analyzes the structure and mechanism of the literaries controversies in Brazilian culture of century XIX. It demonstrates that controversy discourse obeyed certain protocol of performance influenced by oral language and rhetoric, calling attention to the intimate relation between this protocol and the kind of reflexive habit that developed in the Brazilian literary system.

This paper presents and briefly discusses the critical work of Othon Moacyr Garcia, one of the precursors of so called Stylistic Analysis in Brazil. Besides proceeding to a brief historical overview of the arrival of New Criticism in Brazil, we will try to demonstrate, through the summary of two of his pioneering works, the analytical method undertaken by the author.

António Lobo Antunes’ fictional writing presents a unique style since his first published novels. Author of nearly three dozen works, including novels and chronicles, his novelistic fiction, particularly from his last phase, is characterized by a fragmented writing, which includes, among others, discursive linearity disruption, decomposition of words, and unusual punctuation. This innovative style and the graphic layout chosen for his writings evoke a feeling of awkwardness, enhanced by traces of postmodern aesthetics as polyphony, and metafictional discourse, among others. This twist in the author’s discursive style brings about rich images evoked by figures of speech such as metaphors, hyperbole, hypallage, and repetitions (refrains), resulting in a delirious and imagistic discourse. In this paper, various of these features are characterized in connection to some of his novels, particularly the most recent one: “Não é meia noite quem quer”.

In this paper, I will examine how the fundamental processes of technicalising and rationalising are inflected in the higherlevel structuring of written texts, via hyper-Themes. Through an examination of First year University essays in Management and History, the role of hyper-Themes in the development of basic argumentative frameworks will be identified. It will be seen that hyper-Themes have a dual function, establishing retrospective and prospective connections to the argumentative framework, and that they have distinctive lexicogrammatical and colligational patterns, according to the discipline. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SINALIZANDO A ORGANIZAÇÃO DE TEXTOS ESCRITOS: HYPERTEMAS EM ENSAIOS DE ADMINISTRAÇÃO E HISTÓRIA Este artigo examina como os processos de tecnicalizar e racionalizar são flexionados na dimensão superior da organização do discurso escrito através dos hipertemas. Partindo da análise de ensaios produzidos por calouros dos cursos de Administração de Empresas e História, identifica o papel dos hipertemas no desenvolvimento da estrutura argumentativa. Demontra que os hipertemas têm função dual, estabelecendo conecções restrospectivas e prospectivas com a estrutura argumentativa e apresentando padrões lexico-gramaticais e coligacionais distintos, de acordo com a disciplina. --- Artigo em inglês.

This paper investigated how lexical markers, lexical specificity, and syntactical complexity related to the way in which two composition instructors judged a freshman-ESL-student’s essay. While one rater drew on the lexical organization to create coherence, the other did not find in the context of discourse enough information to do the same, assessing the text less favorably than the first. Information structure and overuse of parallel and Y-movement constructions may explain why raters disagree in this and in other similar cases. To close, some pedagogical implications are discussed.

This paper is concerned with the conditions that govern variation in causative-ergative constructions in Brazilian Portuguese. Following research by Whitaker-Franchi (1989) and Levin & Rappaport-Hovav (1995), those conditions are reformulated based on the semantic properties of these constructions. We offer a detailed analysis of the thematic grid for variant causative verbs and a specification of the property of the element that functions as ‘trigger’ of the process, based on Cançado (2005).

Adopting the Minimalist Program framework (CHOMSKY 2000, 2001), this paper suggests that, in Brazilian Portuguese, sentences with a locative prepositional phrase in preverbal position can be characterized as instances of locative inversion in which prepositional constituents occupy the grammatical subject position. It will be proposed that particularities involving the patterns of locative inversion in Brazilian Portuguese derive from properties of the subject-verb agreement in this language.

This paper discusses self projections on city writing and their relationship with reading personal memory and with narrator formation process in the autobiographical narrative La Forme d’une ville, by Julien Gracq. The discussion we propose here is based on some aspects of Freudian notion of “trace”, on Walter Benjamin’s reading of this same notion, and on Proust’s project of remembrance past. With these reflections, we intend to demonstrate the way a synthesis between past and present takes form in the consciousness, by language.

Starting in the seventies, when it defined itself as an analytical orientation to language studies, North-American functional linguistics has refined and updated its theoretical principles and assumptions. Within the scope of functional linguistics, the concepts of discourse and grammar gain prominence. Although no discrepancies have been acknowledged with respect to how these concepts were originally defined, there have been, in more than three decades of studies, reformulations of such concepts with a view to 1) accounting for recent results in research; and 2) describing and interpretatively analyzing linguistic use. The present paper focusses on this trajectory, taking account of both international and national developments in this area of study, emphasizing, in Brazil, the production of knowledge carried out by the research group Grammar & Discourse, which pioneered studies in the area. Problems, tendencies and challenges in this area of investigation are also pointed out, and it is claimed that this is an area of investigation which still has much to contribute to a broader understanding of how language works.

A highly discrediting paper was written by Machado de Assis on Eça de Queirós’s novel, O primo Basílio. However, this Brazilian writer gives some interesting clues about the novel. His criticism involves several topics, such as: the realism of the novel, the character’s motivations, eroticism and others. All of them may rouse, in accordance or divergence with Machado’s interpretation, many subjects for the understanding of O primo Basílio. Besides, the reader, according to Machado’s text, has a chance to evaluate how the author’s literary work has changed with time, as well as the affinities and differences between Machado and Eça’s works.

The present article discusses critically the self-unfolding of the subject-author into personae who speak in the text. In addition, the article puts forward the category of individual “otherness”. “Otherness” is considered a manifestation of the characters (i.e. the various masks [= personae] which make up our personality, as they interact). The study focuses on the relationship between discursive locus and the choice of a linguistic style. As the analysis unfolds, the paper discusses linguistic multiplicity needed for the self-unfolding of subjects, as they perform a variety of textual- discursive roles. In this way, it is attempted to apply the theory of internal polyglossia (the hypothesis of polyglossia operating within one’s own language), as well as its textual materialization. The analysis stems from a socio-interactional and functional-semiotic perspective. These theoretical standpoints help identify signs which may either iconically or indexically point at the discursive-textual self-unfolding of the subject. The materialization of stylistic changes is observed by means of the restoration of possible clues retrieved from the configuration of syntactic-semantic relationships and mechanisms which may be observed in the organization of the text and the discourse.