Revista de Estudos da Linguagem

Post-Fordism, ICTs and Technolanguage

2024-11-04T11:19:35-03:00

This article intends to systematize a discussion on the ways in which transformations imbricated in the passage from Fordism-Taylorism to post-Fordism are associated with the development of interaction processes and linguistic practices in which traits such as technologization, virtualization, and de-referentialization are presented as constitutive elements. The argumentation mobilizes theoretical and analytical contributions that focus on the forms of organization assumed by post-industrial capitalism, including those of Harvey (2010) and Castells (2002), with which it seeks to articulate approaches focused on the role of language in the configuration of post-Fordist society, in particular those of Lazzarato (2014), Berardi (2020) and Virno (2014). The corpus of the article consists of excerpts from utterances collected in interaction processes observed on various online platforms and applications. Among the conclusions to which the argumentation developed in the article leads can be indicated the idea that the prominence of information and communication technologies brought about by the post-Fordist system of production and social regulation has as one of its effects the constitution of a technolanguage that, inscribed in different linguistic-discursive practices, is characterized, among other things, by the hybridization of real and virtual, natural and artificial, human and machinic elements.

“How do I say it in Portuguese?”

2024-11-04T11:49:12-03:00

This research aims to interactively analyze excerpts of a video published on YouTube entitled “24 HOURS SPEAKING PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL!!!”. In this video, three Korean friends visit different commercial establishments in São Paulo to interact with Brazilian Portuguese speakers. From the interactions, it is possible to identify several actions performed to make themselves understood while speaking this language. The in-depth analysis of these strategies constitutes our research theme. Through the interactions available in the video, we seek to identify which interactional actions and practices were used to achieve intersubjectivity when speaking Portuguese as an additional language with Brazilians. As secondary objectives, the research aims to describe these practices and actions in order to verify which ones are successful in achieving the interactional purposes and also to observe the practices put in place by Portuguese speakers to facilitate the understanding of Rico, organizer of the analyzed video, and his friends in and through speech-in-interaction. In addition, it aims to show whether these practices could be taken to the Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL) classroom. To achieve the proposed objectives, this research is anchored in the methodological perspective of Conversation Analysis (Sacks; Schegloff; Jefferson, 1974), whose main objective is to describe actions used by common speakers when participating in intelligible and socially organized interactions. For this analysis, the data were transcribed using the conventions of Jefferson (1984) and Mondada (2022). From the transcription and scrutiny of the available data, it was possible to identify several practices and actions relevant to the interactions that occurred in the video, such as mimes, gestures and repetitions. These actions were described in order to highlight the joint construction of understanding in this context.

Journalism and the Truth Will

2024-11-04T12:00:42-03:00

Considering the power that journalism and media have and the will to truth that they aim to generate, this article has as its corpus of analysis the Case of Escola Base, an event that happened between March and June 1994, in São Paulo (SP). This paper seeks to analyze the discursive strategies in the investigation about the Escola Base Case by reporter Valmir Salaro, which were aired on Jornal Nacional, and in the headlines of newspapers published at the time, for the construction of the will to truth. In the light of Discourse Analysis, we base our proposal on authors such as Foucault (2011), Sargentini and Carvalho (2021), Marques (2021), and Possenti (2021). As a methodology, we studied some clippings of the documentary Escola Base - Um repórter enfrenta o passado, available on Globoplay, in which we researched the discursive strategies in the reports published at the time.

Multi-Level Approach for Critical Discourse Analysis

2024-11-04T12:12:49-03:00

This study addresses methodological issues of critical discourse analysis and shows how an analytical multi-level approach we developed can be useful in adding theoretical resources and systematization to its methods. The analytical approach is grounded on the macrostructure of human activity (activity, actions, operations) and appropriates resources from text linguistics and sociolinguistics. We crossed this approach with historical and positioning discourses to identify ways of talking, foregrounded, and concealed meanings and ideologies in the statement of the ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson as delivered to the House of Commons on Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Our results point out he established an agreement with the House through an explanatory statement with the predominance of the use of informing discursive procedures, which corresponded for almost half of his procedures. Most of the time Johnson spoke in the future tense through the intense use of the modal auxiliary verb “will”. These, among other linguistic choices, collaborated to conceal the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s roles in the invasion of Ukraine, framing responsibility solely on the president of Russia. In conclusion, we comment on the contributions and limitations of the analytical approach.

Saussure’s Interdiscourses

2024-11-04T12:20:17-03:00

The study of language in the 19th century faced a great challenge: defining itself as a science at a time when there was a strong tendency to associate the term “science” only to biology, chemistry, and physics. It was imperative to remove language studies from the natural sciences and constitute an autonomous linguistic science in the humanities. Studying this period through a bibliographical research, we find a central character in this change of course: the North American William D. Whitney, who made a considerable effort to combat the tendencies of affiliating language studies to natural sciences and establish Linguistics as a field of knowledge on its own. Given the scenario described, the aim of this article is to analyze Whitney’s contributions to the foundation of linguistic science and to the widely known ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. When studying the life and work of Whitney, we observed that he anticipated many concepts we find in Course of General Linguistics, attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure. Our primary motivation was then to understand these direct influences of Whitney on the Genevan professor’s work by carrying out a historical-comparative study. As a result, we know a little about how the statements that changed the course of linguistic science in the 19th and 20th centuries first passed through the work of the North American professor. Because of Whitney’s research, language studies changed direction: they left the field of natural facts to inscribe themselves in historical and social facts and find the definition of language as a system.

The “amarelinha” of the Brazilian Team

2024-11-05T07:23:52-03:00

In 2022, in the wake of the Football World Cup, the Brahma beer brand released an advertising film, “#Vestindoaamerelinha”, with the aim of preventing possible correlations between the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (CBF) T-shirt with politics. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the strategies in this advertising film using the notion of internal dialogicity of discourse, by Bakhtin (2015 [1934-1935]). The methodological perspective of the work is based on text comparisons (Bakhtin, 2011 [1974]). The results indicate that the advertising film strategy forge a disidentification of the CBF T-shirt (“amarelinha”) with the values of the right wing politics, while also avoiding elements that could lead to an identification of the brand with the left wing, such as the red color of the beer cans, since the film is all in black and white, with an exclusive emphasis on the T-shirts, which appear in color.

Analysis of the Intonation of Wh-Questions in Non-Standard Chilean Spanish

2024-11-05T07:32:31-03:00

The objective of this research is to describe the melodic contours of wh-questions in a speech sample obtained from eight Chilean cities, which were grouped into the Northern Zone (Iquique and La Serena), Central Zone (Valparaíso and Santiago), Southern Zone (Concepción and Temuco), and Austral Southern Zone (Coyhaique and Punta Arenas). The recordings were produced by adult speakers who had not completed their mandatory minimum education or who had not continued university studies. To observe the behavior of intonation contours, the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method was used. The results show eight types of contours, ordered in descending order according to their number of occurrences. The main conclusions indicate that, in contrast to what has been described for Spanish in general, Chileans primarily produce melodic curves with a characteristic final ascending inflection.

Evaluative Aspects of Metaphors in Journalistic Discourse

2024-11-05T08:14:08-03:00

Based on Cognitive Linguistics, this article analyzes figurative processes, predominantly metaphor, in the context of current journalistic reports in Brazilian Portuguese. Considering the theoretical contributions of Conceptual Metaphor, by Lakoff and Johnson (2002 [1980]), and the notion of fictivity, by Talmy (2019 [2000]), the most relevant foundation has to do with Deignan’s (2010) understanding on evaluative metaphors. According to her, there are four ways for the metaphor to promote an evaluation: generated implications; evoked metaphorical scenarios; chosen source domains; explored connotations. From a methodological point of view, uses of metaphors were mapped in the first two texts of the series of reports Vaza Jato, launched by The Intercept Brasil, to integrate a qualitative-interpretative analysis. The results indicate that the journalistic discourse critically uses evaluative metaphors, as well as their respective imagery schemes and their implications, partially requesting the same figurative bases activated by the sources of information, characteristics which arise from the leaked data, suggesting the evaluative perspective of journalists on these messages. In the enunciative context of the analyzed reports, the selection of source domains proved to be crucial for the evaluative character of the metaphors. Another relevant aspect is the appropriation, by journalistic discourse, of evaluative metaphors arising from information sources, to use them argumentatively against these very sources. Finally, in terms of textual production, the reports resort to the same figurative and evaluative processes to obtain cohesion and coherence through metaphor.

Discourse, Power and Truth

2024-11-05T08:25:46-03:00

This article examines the argumentative dimension of ten headlines on media regulation, published between August 2021 and December 2022, and how they were constructed in order to induce the reader’s interpretation. The analysis considers, at first, the perspective of argumentative semantics, with its evaluation indices and attitudinal indicators (Koch, 1995), and the discursive perspective, aiming to capture the framing strategies, argumentative orientation that induce reasoning and enunciative erasure, proposed by Emediato (2013). Next, based on the concept of enunciation and the notion of the will to truth (Foucault, 1972, 2014, respectively), and Charaudeau’s (2022) reflections on manipulation of the truth, the analysis focuses on the ways in which media discourse directs guidelines for society. The conclusion is that discussing media regulation projects is an urgent need for Brazilian society, since the headlines are biased and most of them promote a campaign of opposition to regulation projects, associating them with censorship.

Discursive Archive Technology

2024-11-05T08:34:47-03:00

From the perspective of Pecheuxtian Discourse Analysis, we present the archive as a discursive technology, which is an instrument of (re)production/transformation of discursive practice, and, consequently, of political practice. In this way, we work with the discursive archive technology from the perspective of the socio-historical and political-ideological functioning of language. This functioning is a condition for the production of (re)configurations of dominance in relations of force, power, meanings, within the class struggle. From an established archive on the significance of Brazilian (anti)democracy, we isolate photographic compositions that discursivize in the digital space, above all, the Brazilian presidential inaugurations, with emphasis on the last two, which took place in 2019 and 2023. To analyze these photographic compositions, we establish a relationship between discourses that can be (re)updated through the material formulations that point to the presence-absence in the photographs that compose such compositions. In this way, it was possible to expose to the reader’s eye the discursive process that determines the (re)production/transformation, in a space of discursive dispute/polemic, in/of the signification of (anti)democracy within Brazilian society.

The Processing of the Primary Stress in Brazilian Portuguese from the Dual Route Model

2024-11-05T08:42:33-03:00

This paper contrasts the processing of primary stress in Brazilian Portuguese pseudowords based on the Cascade Dual Route Model (Coltheart; Rastle, 1994; Rastle; Coltheart, 2000). The Model postulates the existence of two processing routes depending on the type of word: familiar real words are processed via the lexical route and unfamiliar real words and pseudowords are processed via the non-lexical route. To verify whether stress in Portuguese can be analyzed from this perspective, two experimental studies were carried out to evaluate whether speakers, when reading a pseudoword, apply the general rule (Bisol’s Metric Hypothesis, 1994) through the activation of the lexical route; or if they make use of lexical information, such as phonological similarity with a real word, morphological information and final segments, through the activation of the non-lexical route. Experiment 1 evaluated phonological similarity and experiment 2 evaluated morphological derivational patterns, both in relation to the general rule. The results indicate that pseudowords retrieve lexical, segmental and morphological information when processed, calling into question processing based solely on the existence of two routes guided by the type of word. There is evidence that the activation of the stress pattern can occur through different mechanisms.

Argument Coreference Between Content Verbs and Predicative Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

2024-11-05T08:50:25-03:00

The literature on complement clauses and support/light verb constructions provides most of the available information on coreference between arguments of matrix and subordinate syntactic predicates. However, this phenomenon is largely unexplored when it comes to verb phrases consisting of a content verb and a predicative noun in object position, such as declarar paixão (“declare passion”), cumprir a promessa (“fulfill the promise”), responder perguntas (“answer questions”), or resistir à tentação (“resist temptation”). The notions of obligatory and non-obligatory coreference do not fully explain this phenomenon, since non-coreferential usage of these phrases leads to different types of coercion, which are relevant properties to classify these phrases. This paper proposes a pilot study of verb phrases of this kind, extracting them from a Brazilian Portuguese newspaper corpus aiming at their syntactic-semantic classification. This procedure revealed a total of 75 such verb phrases. Based on semantic coercion and distributional properties, four major classes divided into seven subclasses are proposed to cover two-thirds of the data. There is also a fifth class with 17 items in which coreference appears to be a contextual property, i.e., unrelated to lexical semantics, and eight hapax legomena. The results provide a new perspective on this understudied topic, identifying also irregular aspects deserving further studies

The Polysemic Network of the Verb Ficar in Portuguese L1 (Brazil) and Portuguese L2 (French language learners)

2024-11-05T08:57:55-03:00

This paper analyzes how the different senses of the verb ficar are used in an elicitation test in Portuguese as a first and a second language (L1/L2). The aim of this study is to analyze the organization and use of the polysemic network of ficar for two groups of participants. The most prototypical meanings of a word or a construction have been operationalized in many studies as the most mentioned ones in elicitation experiments (Gries, 2015, p.473). Portuguese L1 participants were instructed to elicit three sentences with the verb ficar. On the other hand, learners of Portuguese (L2) were asked to do the same test, and also to translate their sentences into French. The translation task aimed to understand what meaning the learners intended to convey when they used the verb ficar. It also served to analyze which verbs were used by the learners to translate this verb (equivalences). The results revealed a different organization of the polysemic network of the verb ficar in Portuguese L1 and L2. L2 group elicited concrete meanings more frequently than L1 group whereas L1 participants elicited abstract meanings more frequently than L2 participants. The analysis also revealed very little variation between the results of participants with an initial level of L2 Portuguese and more advanced levels. This fact shows that it is difficult to acquire frequent and polysemous verbs in L2 and corroborates the trends observed in literature.

On Ronald Langacker’s Semanticocentrism

2024-11-05T09:14:33-03:00

Ray Jackendoff understands that Noam Chomsky’s linguistic models distort the nature of language due to its ‘syntactocentrism.’ Coined by Jackendoff, this term means Chomsky’s assumption that the syntactic component of language is central while the phonological and semantic components are merely interpretive. Jackendoff also states that since the 1970s many researchers have made a mistake opposite to Chomsky’s, by denying that syntax has a relevant role in grammar. Considering such a scenario, this paper analyzes Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar, in which syntax is replaced by semantics as the central linguistic component. The goal is to show how Langacker misrepresented language structure by doing so.

On Discursive Regularity in Media Linkages

2024-11-05T09:21:13-03:00

This work performs a comparative analysis of two episodes of our political history that suggest the existence of a certain regularity in the way media instances responsible for the circulation of political discourse coordinate themselves today. Given the similarity of the linkages formed between such instances and the consequences generated in each case, the research aim was the analysis of the circuit that interconnects them, with which a series of responses seem to coordinate themselves and stabilize a sort of chain communication mechanism. To build our analytical path, the concepts of genre chain (Swales, 2004), which serves the purpose of investigating how discursive genres are associated, and mediatic linkage (Primo, 2008), with which one must assume that the different media levels function in an articulated way supported by intertextual mechanisms, were combined. Through the analysis of the resumption strategies used in each of the communicational instances, the analysis displayed that, in the examined chain, the TV exerts a centralizing role insofar as it provides the initial motion that generates the circuit in which genres appear juxtaposed, always recovering the television content. From this initial stimulus, episodes are critically commented on in social media (notably on Twitter), which leads to the representation of this repercussion in digital newspapers, and, finally, in political acts and manifestations in the streets.