Search

This article presents the results of a research that aimed to verify the acquisition of verbal forms related to tense and aspect, demonstrating the results of an investigation carried out after the study of the emergence of verbal structures (in simple form and in periphrastic form -- auxiliary and main verb) effectively produced by five monolingual children, between 2 years old and 5 years and 11 months old, in the process of language acquisition. The corpus used was cataloged by two members of the eLinC group -- Studies in Language and Cognition (in press). The objective was to understand, in addition, to what extent the notions of semantic/ lexical aspect influence or not on the appearance of grammatical aspect marks. This work has two hypotheses: (i) in children's grammar, the notion of aspect appears, more recurrently, before the notion of tense and (ii) when the verbal forms in the present tense and in the perfect past tense appear, the aspect is expressed. Based on qualitative analyses, we understand that the aspect is a category that appears before tense, but, even so, younger children present the tense category in their spontaneous productions, which is in line with what the Generative Theory advocates, which is the theoretical framework adopted to carry out this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his essay Cognitive Linguistics and Autonomous Linguistics, published in the 2007 Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, John R. Taylor suggests dialogue and even integration between cognitive linguistics and other approaches in language studies. Following Taylor's line of argument this article reviews George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of conceptual metaphor. This study intends to address both authors' empirical and rhetorical excesses since publishing Metaphors we live by forty years ago as an outcome of their rejection of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. Thus, it is expected to further converge generativism and cognitivism, as already initiated by researchers such as Taylor, Ray Jackendoff, Peter Culicover, Alan Prince, and Paul Smolensky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the EsABE project was to create, as the result of the interaction with a group of schools, a model of co-construction of sustainable solutions in a whole-school approach in order to promote skills related to education, well- -being, health and environment, in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the 2030 Agenda. With the recent definition of the skills that students should have developed when they finish compulsory education, the challenge posed at present is to define the profile of the schools, as ecosystems, that are more capable of bringing students closer to those skills. The EsABE aimed to establish, together with school principals, teachers, students and other educational agents, a “generative grammar “, which from the set of identified characteristic situations in each studied school and the minimum set of identified rules should provide access to a number of not limited educational sustainable responses that will help identify this profile of school. This paper addresses two challenges posed to schools – initial SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats) and analyses of the Questionnaire of Satisfaction, Expectations and Needs, which was applied to every school within the EsABE project. The main results of the SWOT analyses identified as common strengths 1 - a everlasting shared history enabled by the proximity and cohesion of the agents of the school community, 2 - the existence of a feeling of belonging to the ecosystem, embracing not only its positive parts but also its negative ones, 3 - the intentionality and relevance given to the development of actions that promote well-being, as well as 4 - the participatory character of actions (which doesn’t allow these actions to be seen as independent but instead be integrated as part of the schools’ culture). The major common threat referred to was school facilities although several schools were able to find their own solutions as part of their ongoing co-construction. The urgent need for administrative modernization was frequently recognized by several schools as its obsolescence can jeopardize the proper functioning of a functional healthy ecosystem. Schools showed having good expectations and a high degree of satisfaction towards the EsABE project, both aspects having improved from the first to the second evaluation moment, which suggests that schools have increasingly laid hold of the project, making it part of their own culture and therefore using it as another instrument, another part of their history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect has been groundwork for modern physics since the seventeenth century. Due to the success of that discipline, researchers from other fields of study followed its principles, including the idea of nature being perfect. Noam Chomsky's Generative Grammar was a particularly interesting case of such epistemological transposition, which took place in the twentieth century, mainly in his Minimalist Program. In his work, while taking to ultimate levels what he dubbed "the Galilean intuition that 'nature is perfect'", Chomsky proposes language as well is perfect. However, given that in Generativism language is also seen as a biological system, conjecture on its perfection results in a highly unlike assertion that it is unique from a biological point of view, because biological systems are characteristically imperfect since they are results of evolutionary accidents. Built on such almost paradoxical situation reached in Chomsky's minimalism, this article discusses the limits to emulating physics in other fields of study, more specifically in biology and cognitive sciences, among which stands linguistics. As a result of this investigation, this work questions the very metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect, along with ideas from contemporary thinkers such as physicist Marcelo Gleiser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study has as object the category Tense in the acquisition of written Brazilian Portuguese by deaf people. The analysis of the phenomenon of acquisition of the Tense category investigated here was based on the generative theory, assuming the innatist proposition of language acquisition. In the context of the acquisition of L2, we assumed the hypothesis of indirect access to Universal Grammar (UG). Our corpus consists of naturalistic samples - texts produced in a school environment. Results indicate the occurrence of specific temporal operators of Libras (Brazilian sign language) in the interlanguage - the past and future lexical items and certain adverbs. We observed the occurrence of lexical operator for past Tense marking in verbs with non-punctual Aspect and the dispensation of this mark in cases of verbs with perfective Aspect, as occurs in Libras according to a study by Silva (2015) and Silva and Lessa-de-Oliveira (2016). This finding characterizes indirect access to the UG in the process of acquisition of L2. The written productions also displayed temporal flexion according to the parameters of Brazilian Portuguese and the use of auxiliary verbs to mark the future tense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditionally called "nominative forms" of pronouns are also oblique representatives without any marginality in its acceptance in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). There is no univocal correspondence between a pronominal form and a unique casual function, as expected in European Portuguese (EP). We also argue, in this work, the plural first-person pronouns integrate the vernacular system of BP pronouns and do not compete with each other. Based on the assumptions of the Generative Theory, we argue that the grammatical change, related to the opposition of a system composed by six grammatical persons toward an opposition of first and third person singular, has as consequence a change in the grammatical features of the pronouns that are no longer marked as nominative in the lexicon; so, the Brazilian vernacular pronoun paradigm is characterized by a flexional paradigm and a concordance system distinct from EP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates the history of the linguistic behavior of the protagonist of the film The Kaspar Hauser's enigma (1974), of the German director, the phenomena of language acquisition and the innate linguistic competence, postulated by gerativism and investigates how they are revealed in the commission of a speaker who later acquired the verbal language. The Generative Theory postulates the existence of a language acquisition device with h the individual is born and which, in contact with a natural language, generates the language of grammar that is exposed, developing communication skills. The present work is a fictional analysis in the form of a case study, of the descriptive and exploratory type, of qualitative character. This fictional analysis, related to gerativism, corroborates the idea that it is possible for someone who has been out of touch with other humans, such as Kaspar, to develop verbal language, although late, but that some limitations, especially related to abstract thinking that makes possible the comprehension of the representativeness of the linguistic signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses subject-verb agreement in Portuguese and puts forward a novel proposal for "teaching" subject-verb agreement in secondary schools, a proposal in line with Chomsky's theory of generative grammar. A further objective is to promote a debate on Grammar "teaching" and linguistic education, taking into consideration the importance of dealing with Chomsky's conception of linguistic competence. Our results point to the relevance of elicitation techniques in educational settings. The notion of "elicitation" represents an important tool for Grammar teachers, as it reveals the significant role of students' linguistic intuitions regarding subject-verb agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aimed to analyze the verbal argument structure of the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) from speech samples in Libras produced by deaf informants. These data were videotaped and transcribed through writing SEL (Writing System of Sign Languages). We based our discussion on the generative theory and on the hypothesis of MLMov unit (Hand-Location-Movement) developed by Lessa-de-Oliveira (2012) for identifying signs of the Libras. The results indicated that the signs are formed by one, two or three MLMov units grouped according the semantic roots present; and the verbal argument structure of Libras occurs through: saturation by lexical categories, saturation by empty categories, saturation by Locs (Locators) or by self-saturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a set of four testimonies from Brazilian researchers who fell in love with Distributed Morphology after the publication of the inaugural article by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz, "Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection", in 1993. This theory proposes a new architecture of grammar that has a lot in common with syntax and little to do with traditional morphology - for example, the ancient lexicon is broken down into three different lists. Each of the contributors was invited to answer the following questions: (i) What is the feature of Distributed Morphology that leads you to prefer this version of generative grammar to ground your work?, (ii) What was the first subject you explored based on this theory?, (iii) Why does this model seem to you more interesting than the traditional generative one?, (iv) Which subjects did you encourage your students to explore in the past and which ones do you currently encourage? What are the interfaces of the grammar that are highlighted in each case?, (v) Which questions do you plan to explore in the near future? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a generative analysis of verb agreement with partitive constructions comprising the terms "maioria" and "parte". Optional character of agreement with these constructions is discussed. It is argued that verb agreement depends on the classification of the partitive term, which can be either a lexical or a functional item. In the first case, it is assumed that the partitive term governs agreement and that a plural DP is within its complement. In the second case, it is assumed that the subject is a Small Clause and the verb agrees with the plural DP that is modified by the partitive term, which is analyzed as a quantifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category by children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. It reconciles a psycholinguistic approach to language acquisition with a minimalist conception of language (Chomsky, 1995-2001). The results of the experiments reported here are compatible with the working hypothesis, namely, that children make use of syntactic and morphological information in the delimitation of adjectives as a lexical category. They also reveal that the semantic properties of derivation affixes forming adjectives are already available by the age of two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, We describe the efficacy of lexical blends, like 'Luísque' ('Lula' + 'uísque') and 'Jeguerino' ('Jegue' + 'Severino'), in Agamenon Mendes Pedreira's articles, published by O Globo once in a week. We show that lexical blends are constructions that cause an expressive impact in textual and discursive levels. We too argue that blends are a resource for the expression of humor in these articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]