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This paper aims to provide a dialectal and sociolinguistic approach and description of the use of the lexical and semantic regionalisms in contemporary spoken Portuguese in urban Funchal (the capital of Madeira) and in four rural areas of the island. The study of the lexicon and its semantic variation is based on recent samples of a semasiological questionnaire, applied to stratified informants by sex/gender, age group and level of education. The correlation of the results with the extralinguistic factors, geographical origin of the respondents on the island and sociocultural variables from the qualitative analysis and the quantitative point of view confirm that speakers from urban areas are less conservative than those from rural areas and showed flexibility and variability as well as stability of lexical meanings, two opposite and complementary lexicon characteristics. The traditional lexicon of Madeira studied highlights the coexistence of dialectal forms, some of them common to the Azores and Brazil, with European Portuguese standard variants. Therefore, the qualitative and the quantitative expression of the knowledge of Madeiran regionalisms and their lexical and semantic variations expose their vitality and support the heterogeneity of the European Portuguese language and the identity of the Portuguese spoken on Madeira Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trabalhos em Lingüística Aplicada is the property of Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Portal de Periodicos Eletronicos Cientificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the increasing time Brazilians spend on social-networking websites, Interactional Sociolinguistics has become more interested on the interaction by the means of these new media, particularly Facebook - the most used social media website in Brazil. This paper aims at studying the configuration of impoliteness in an online text published on Facebook as well as verifying the role of lexis in the impoliteness research. In this article, we understand (im)politeness as an evaluative phenomenon by which behaviors are judged regarding their social adequacy, so they are normally labeled as: polite, impolite, rude, courteous, aggressive, excessively polite etc. Moreover, impoliteness, according to Culpeper and Hardaker (2017), is the technical term that designates behaviors that are generally judged as socially inadequate. In order to achieve our goal, this paper reports an exploratory study in which we analyze a text published on Facebook, observing the conventionalized impoliteness formulae and the lexical choices in the light of the textual-interactive perspective. The results show that the study of lexis contributes to the analysis of impoliteness by accounting for linguistic aspects, and that some features of the interaction on Facebook stimulate that impoliteness is more directed to interlocutors' ideological positions rather than their individual selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sophia, Colección de Filosofía de la Educación is the property of Universidad Politecnica Salesiana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Following the theoretical and methodological principles of Variationist Sociolinguistics, this paper analyzes the use of the aspirated variant of postvocalic /s/ by residents of City of God, a predominantly-black neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro that is widely known as a favela (roughly, shantytown or slum). The analyzed data consist of seventeen sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2015 with twenty-two residents of this community. The quantitative analysis included six social variables-race/color, regional origin, age, gender, education, and speaker-as well as six linguistic variables-preceding vowel, following sound, syllabic stress, number of syllables, grammatical category, and word. Race/color, age, and all the linguistic factors considered in the analysis were selected as statistically significant to the occurrence of /s/ aspiration. This study indicates a possible connection between aspiration and race/color and stresses the importance of including racial identity as a relevant factor in sociolinguistic studies in Brazil, especially those focusing on favelas and other similar urban communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that the incorporation of the first-person plural pronoun a gente has not only reached the southernmost tip of the Brazilian territory, but has crossed the border and entered Uruguayan Portuguese, or varieties of Portuguese spoken in northern Uruguay by Portuguese–Spanish bilinguals. This finding is based on the quantification of the a gente/nós variable in sociolinguistic interviews carried out in two border communities: Aceguá, Brazil, and Aceguá, Uruguay. The analysis of interviews recorded on each side of the border yielded a total of 1000 tokens that were submitted to a multivariate analysis. Following the premises of comparative sociolinguistics, we compared the distribution of the variable on both sides of the border and found that although Uruguayans used a gente less often than Brazilians, this innovation, preferred by young speakers, is incorporated in both dialects, following similar linguistic paths. These results show that Uruguayan Portuguese has incorporated the pronominal a gente in its grammar in a clear sign of convergence towards Brazilian Portuguese and divergence from Spanish, despite the coexistence with Spanish that categorically uses nosotros as the first-person plural pronoun and reserves the cognate la gente for its purely lexical meaning 'the people'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language, as a means of social interaction, participates in the changing human reality, constituting new linguistic forms and structures of the social environment. Sociolinguistics studies show the frequent variation and changes in languages. From this theoretical bias, this paper aims to analyze the approach of verbs ter and haver in normative and descriptive grammars. For this, we analyzed the approaches on these verbs in the grammars of Rocha Lima (1974), Cunha (1982), Castilho (2010) and Perini (2010). The present study is justified by the desire to observe how the changes in the use of these verbs were reflected in the grammar compendiums and, consequently, in the Portuguese Language teaching in Brazil. Thus, the research will walk between studies on linguistic changes and the history of Portuguese Language teaching in Brazil intertwined with the conceptions of language. From this research, it was possible to verify that, unlike normative grammars, the descriptive portray the reality Brazilian linguistics, in the use of the verbs ter and haver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Perception studies have required the development of new techniques, as well as new ways of analyzing data. This paper discusses the proposal of Kappa statistic for the measurement of agreement amongst judgments in perception tests. The analysis deals with data obtained from a subjective reaction test focusing on the variable pronunciation of /t, d/ as stops or affricates in Aracaju, Sergipe, Brazil, considering aesthetic, rhythmic, and dialectal factors. Kappa statistic shows aspects of the interrater agreement and reliability that can explain how the linguistic change is driven in the community. This type of analysis also allows to account for, in a perception study, the sex/gender bias observed in production. Results suggest that Kappa-statistics is a tool that can improve the explanatory power of perceptual studies in Sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we learn from language island research? Answers drawn from German language island research refer to linguistics, ethnology and language politics. German language islands in Russia and Brazil are on the way to language shift. The varieties of these communities display varying degrees of decomposition and simplification in terms of morphology. Regular and irregular morphology are developing differently. How could these differences be explained? What is the impact of language contact? To what extent does variation within language change depend on the distinctiveness of this linguistic community? The contribution is about comparative language island research, relating linguistic results to the ethnographic background and the conditions of language politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Trends in Psychiatry & Psychotherapy is the property of Associacao de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article describes inalienability in the Wauja (Arawak) language in the context of Brazilian Upper Xinguan culture. Wauja grammar encodes a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession that marks kin, body parts, and other terms and that largely but not perfectly overlaps with a local cultural category of emblematic possessions. I analyze how grammatical and cultural aspects of inalienable possession combine in discourse and exchange to contribute to the social identities of possessors. I present an ethnographic account of the role of inalienability in Wauja grammar and discourse in the disruption and repair of social relationships between groups in Upper Xinguan ritual. I argue for a mutually reinforcing relationship between grammatical categories and sociocultural meaning. I suggest that attention to language and possession, in addition to language and identity, is important for cross culturally comparative sociolinguistic analysis of such connections. (Inalienable possession, grammatical categories, discourse, exchange, Upper Xingu, Wauja (Arawak), ethnolinguistic identity)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, the available data on the Arikapú and Djeoromitxí languages of the Brazilian Amazon, which together form the Jabuti language family, have been too sparse to enable one to evaluate existing proposals for a genealogical classification. Recent descriptive fieldwork, however, has yielded information that strongly corroborates an early hypothesis of Nimuendajú (2000 [1935]) that the languages are related to those of the Jê family. In this article, we compare the reconstructed ancestors of both families, Proto-Jabutí (van der Voort 2007) and Proto-Jê (Ribeiro [forthcoming]), ultimately demonstrating that Nimuendajú was right. We also discuss some of the consequences of this discovery for current ideas about prehistoric population movements in lowland South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the register of slang has historically been embraced to forge salient social and spatial distinctions, demarcating the physical space of the favela (shantytown) and naturalizing the exclusion of its residents. In this article, I examine the ongoing enregisterment of slang in Rio's current context of profound social inequality, democratic instability, heightened urban violence, and geographic proximity. Within this climate of fear and insecurity, newly vulnerable and newly marginalized city residents draw on and reify salient speech repertoires to negotiate rights to the city and to the nation-state that have become increasingly threatened along socioeconomic, racial, and residential lines. I argue that the enregisterment of slang constructs newly emergent citizenship categories that both challenge and reinforce Brazil's entrenched regime of differentiated citizenship, illuminating the productive role of linguistic differentiation in the modern nation-state. [Keywords: slang, crime, citizenship, marginality, Brazil] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]