Meanings of the preposition “of” in the oral interlanguage of A2 and B2 Brazilian learners

Prepositions are challenging for non-native speakers because of the idiosyncratic behavior of such words which do not follow any predictable pattern in similar contexts (FELICE; PULMAN, 2008). In addition, prepositions are difficult to acquire because their usage is influenced by the speakers’ mother tongue (L1) (KOOSHA & JAFARPOUR, 2006; COWAN et al., 2003; TANIMURA et al., 2004). In order to verify how non-native English speakers use prepositions, this study aims to describe how prepositional profiling of the word “of” are represented in the spoken interlanguage of Brazilian English learners within the proficiency levels A2 and B2 and whether the nature of inappropriate representation is affected by the equivalents in L1. The preposition “of” has been selected as the object of analysis because it is highly frequent in English language corpora (CHODOROW et. al., 2010; DAVIES, 2008; LEECH et. al., 2001). As the corpus for this research, the BraSEL Corpus (Brazilian Spoken of English Learners Corpus) is divided by the learners’ proficiency level according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The major finding was that, even though some errors occurred, the use of the preposition “of'” tended to be well-entrenched in the interviewed Brazilian learners’ grammar. Through this result, we may conclude that “of” and its semantic meanings are stable and acquired since the earlier stages of the learning process

An overview of portuguese wordnets

Semantic relations between words are key to building systems that aim to understand and manipulate language. For En- glish, the “de facto” standard for representing this kind of knowledge is Princeton’s WordNet. Here, we describe the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese: their origins, methods of creation, sizes, and usage restrictions. We start tackling the problem of comparing them, but only in quantitative terms. Finally, we sketch ideas for potential collaboration between some of the projects.(undefined

Goal arguments of ir 'to go' and chegar 'to arrive' in three African varieties of Portuguese

In research on African varieties of Portuguese, especially Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese, it is often referred that Goal arguments of verbs of movement show a tendency to be headed by locative preposition em 'in', contrasting with the use of a 'to' and para 'to, toward' in European Portuguese. Language contact is generally considered the primary factor with respect to the use of the noncanonical pattern. Using spoken corpora of the urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican and Santomean Portuguese, this paper develops a case-study of Goal arguments that occur with two frequently used verbs of inherently directed motion, ir 'to go' and chegar 'to arrive', to assess the contact-induced hypothesis and to explore alternative, semantic-based hypotheses. Overall, a cross-comparison of the varieties at stake and their main contact languages shows that the role of language contact is limited at best. A semantic analysis of em, on the other hand, shows promising results, since the occurrence of this preposition is favored by NPs that denote an entity with well-defined boundaries and is sensitive to the lexical semantics of the verbs, i.e., whether the verb describes a durative or non-durative change of place, and to the type of eventuality described by the predication

Ephemeral Elsewheres: Locating Narratives of Resignation, Resistance, and Refusal in the Poetry of Black Cuban and Black Brazilian Women

This essay dissects the language of Latin American revolution and nationalism to locate the body of the black woman and the appropriation of her image. In two seemingly incommensurable radical movements—the Cuban Revolution (1952-1959) and the Brazilian Unified Black Movement (1978-)—the contributions of Black women are unevenly recognized. Reading the poetry of cubanas Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera and brasileiras Sônia Fátima and Esmeralda Ribeiro, this essay claims that in both contexts, the Black woman is marginalized to a geographic “elsewhere.” Expanding on this term, coined by scholar Carol Boyce Davies, this essay further identifies temporal and ephemeral “elsewheres.” The “elsewheres” allow Black women a particular space to critique white supremacist, patriarchal, and nationalist violence, transforming sites of marginalization into those of critical resistance. Intervening the works of theorists María Saldaña-Portillo, Audre Lorde, and Saidiya Hartman, this essay suggests that the resistance of Black Cuban and Brazilian women necessarily engage with the historical archetypes of the sexualized mulata and negra. The argument that this essay locates in the poetry is that these images, borne from violence against enslaved black women, endure in periods of radical upheaval. The poetry thus provides alternative, critical modes of resistance

Subject agreement in control and modal constructions in Russian Sign Language:Implications for the hierarchy of person features

The present research combines three fields of inquiry in sign language linguistics: verbal agreement, person features, and syntactic complexity. These topics have previously been addressed in isolation, but little is known about their interaction. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating subject agreement in complement clauses in Russian Sign Language. By means of corpus investigation and grammaticality judgments, I found that subject agreement in clausal complements of the control predicates try, love, want, begin, and modal can may be deficient – in particular, it can be reduced to the forms identical to first-person marking even in the case of a third-person subject controller. Deficient subject agreement in complement clauses is thus reminiscent of non-finite verbal forms in spoken languages. I further argue that the choice of first-person forms in deficient agreement reveals a default status of first person in sign languages, which is consistent with proposals regarding the modality-specific properties of first-person reference in these languages

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

Synopsis: This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee

Syntactic architecture and its consequences III

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters develop novel insights into a number of core syntactic phenomena, such as the structure of and variation in diathesis, alignment types, case and agreement splits, and the syntax of null elements. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and they provide varied perspectives on current research in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276

Agreement, case and locality in the nominal and verbal domains

This book explores the Agree operation and its morphological realisations (agreement and case), specifically focusing on the connection between Agree and other syntactic dependencies such as movement, binding and control. The chapters in this volume examine a diverse set of cross-linguistic phenomena involving agreement and case from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with a view to elucidating the nature of the abstract operations that underlie them. The phenomena discussed include backward control, passivisation, progressive aspectual constructions, extraction from nominals, possessives, relative clauses and the phasal status of PPs

Dative constructions in Romance and beyond

This book offers a comprehensive account of dative structures across languages –with an important, though not exclusive, focus on the Romance family. As is well-known, datives play a central role in a variety of structures, ranging from ditransitive constructions to cliticization of indirect objects and differentially marked direct objects, and including also psychological predicates, possessor or causative constructions, among many others. As interest in all these topics has increased significantly over the past three decades, this volume provides an overdue update on the state of the art. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume account for both widely discussed patterns of dative constructions as well as those that are relatively unknown

The size of things I

This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation