This article is an excerpt from Fischer's (2024) master's dissertation and aims to present the results of the analysis of phonological, morphological and lexical aspects of the signs for the colors black and pink in Libras. Data were collected from the National Inventory of Linguistic Development (INDL) of Libras (Quadros et al., 2018) and analyzed considering phonological (variation and stability), morphological (simplex and compound signs), and lexical (formed with or without influence from Portuguese) aspects. As for the phonological aspects, variation and stability varied across the lexical variants identified for each color. Morphologically, we found both simplex and compound signs for black and pink. Finally, in relation to the lexical aspects, signs with and without Portuguese influence were identified for both colors and specifically for black we also found that one of its lexical variant is originally from French Sign Language (LSF). Translation of the article into Libras - https://youtu.be/W9BhiUVokxM
This study investigates morphological variation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) imperatives, focusing on the alternation between forms derived from the tu paradigm (T-IMPER, e.g., faz) and the você paradigm (V-IMPER, e.g., faça). While previous research has linked this variation to geographic, pragmatic (e.g., immediacy), and grammatical (e.g., negative polarity) factors, we hypothesize a social dimension: T-IMPER marks solidarity/non-deferential contexts, while V-IMPER signals deference/social distance. An experiment in Araraquara and Belo Horizonte elicited imperatives from speakers addressing familiar (friend/sibling) and deferential (boss) interlocutors. Results revealed significant variation, with Araraquara speakers favouring V-IMPER in deferential contexts and negative polarity, supporting our hypothesis partially. However, Belo Horizonte showed no such correlation, suggesting regional divergence or idiosyncratic variation. We argue that the lack of categorical patterns may stem from BP’s complex relationship with its written standard, which differs markedly from spoken varieties, promoting tolerance for variability. The study highlights the role of social ecology in maintaining idiosyncratic variation and challenges assumptions that all linguistic variation is functionally or socially motivated. Ultimately, we advocate for greater recognition of free variation as a legitimate linguistic phenomenon, particularly in contexts where standard language ideologies are contested.
The lack of a structured linguistic data collection representing the natural use of sign language limits linguistic understanding, language preservation, educational opportunities, accessibility, and technological advancement while also threatening the cultural heritage of the deaf community. To have a well-documented Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) corpus to ensure that LGP thrives and continues to be recognized as a legitimate and fully developed language, we built the LGP Reference Corpus. In this article, we describe the construction of the first machine-readable digital reference corpus for LGP, with 112 hours 51 minutes of LGP recordings and associated metadata collected between 1992 and 2019, which we listed, digitalized, and archived. We also present the annotation structure and conventions we built to annotate this corpus at different linguistic levels (phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic). Its diachronic foundation and dialectal and social variety data allow future LGP studies on its grammar and variation. Furthermore, the LGP Reference Corpus is the foundation for developing various linguistic tools, such as calculating sign frequency indices, which supported the inclusion of signs in the Fundamental LGP Vocabulary dictionary, aiding in the analysis and extraction of grammatical rules implemented in the LGP Translator (M. Gonsalves et al., 2021).
Early versions of the four papers in this special collection were presented at the first workshop of the FCT-funded project Possession and Location: Microvariation in African Varieties of Portuguese (PALMA), held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon in January 2020. The main goal of PALMA was to investigate and provide new insights into semantic and syntactic aspects in the domain of the argument structure of verbs of possession and location in the urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo), and São Tomé and Príncipe (São Tomé), which are at different stages of an ongoing nativization process and historically in contact with different languages and typologies. This editorial places the content and contribution of the papers in this special collection within the wider context of the relatively young and fast-growing field of research on African varieties of Portuguese. It briefly addresses the sociohistorical and linguistic background in which these varieties emerged, the state of research, and the factors that have played a pivotal role in the debate on the linguistic properties and language variation, in particular the role of language contact, general principles of grammar, and schooling.
The main goal of this article is to provide a semantic characterisation for the structure estar por (literally, 'be by') + infinitive in European Portuguese. The combinatorial restrictions that this construction displays regarding the aspectual class of the predications with which it can cooccur suggest that it takes telic events as its input. Moreover, its linguistic behaviour parallels that of states. The connections between estar por + infinitive and adjectival passives, on the one hand, and sentential negation, on the other, lead us to propose an analysis that treats this configuration as a denied resultant state.
Onomatopoeic words constitute a serious challenge for translators, lexicographers, language learners, and teachers. Hence, empirical data collection on onomatopoeia is highly sought after. The most suitable data sources for extracting onomatopoeia are large language corpora. Since onomatopoeic words and, particularly, interjectional onomatopoeias show wide variance and many of them are created spontaneously, the methodology chosen for automating the extraction in this study initially involved observing the existing patterns of transcribed interjectional onomatopoeias, among which the one based upon repetition proved the most recurring. Among the observed features were the same or similar syllable sequence, three or more repeated letters, combined with punctuational markers such as hyphens, ellipses, quotation, or exclamation marks, part of speech tags. These properties were further implemented in formulating corpus queries. The search was based on the pattern of repetition of similar syllables. The results underwent an ANOVA test that revealed the open and closed hyphenated syllables to be the most reliable pattern for extracting interjectional onomatopoeias from corpora of English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian. The used markers allow for the achievement of high efficiency, which was evaluated in terms of precision.
This paper addresses two types of argument alternations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP): the causative alternation and the phenomenon we call agentive alternation. Both phenomena involve the occurrence of verbs considered to be transitive in intransitive structures (such as a tela quebrou 'the screen broke', in the causative alternation, and a roupa lavou lit. 'the clothes washed', in the agentive alternation). The causative alternation occurs, as established in the literature, with change of state verbs. The agentive alternation, however, does not occur with a uniform set of verbs. This fact raises an important issue for lexicalist theories of argument structure, which center their explanation in semantically uniform verb classes. Thus, this paper shows that non-lexicalist analyses for the agentive alternation in BP fare better. By comparing how the agentive alternation is analyzed in two non-lexicalist approaches: Distributed Morphology and Construction Grammar, our aim is to provide a clear description and theorization of the agentive alternation. Despite different conceptions about how language is structured, these frameworks have similar analytical tools leading to a compatible treatment of the agentive alternation. From a theoretical point of view, we compare their commonalities and differences to understand the state of the art of argument structure alternations across frameworks.
We developed an adaptation of Frota et al.'s (2014) design to investigate, for the first time, early perception of intonation contrasts in a sign language. Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, implemented with eye-tracking, we ran a pilot study with one deaf infant with limited exposure to Portuguese Sign Language (LGP), and one monolingual hearing infant, both coming from European Portuguese (EP) speaking homes. The results indicate that the new procedure can be successfully implemented to investigate deaf (and hearing) infants' sensitivity to the LGP statement/yes-no question prosodic contrast, shortly after 6 months. Interestingly, the looking pattern differed between the infants: the deaf infant looked more to the face than to the body region, while the hearing infant exhibited the reverse pattern. However, both infants demonstrated no evidence of discrimination of the visual prosodic contrast, unlike hearing EP-learning infants, who discriminated the auditory intonation contrast at 5 months (Frota et al., 2014). The results are conjectured to follow from infants' insufficient/lack of exposure to sign language input, as well as from the kind of phonological contrast under study. Further investigation is warranted, applying the new experimental procedure to deaf infants acquiring LGP in LGP homes.
Early versions of the four papers in this special collection were presented at the first workshop of the FCT-funded project Possession and Location: Microvariation in African Varieties of Portuguese (PALMA), held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon in January 2020. The main goal of PALMA was to investigate and provide new insights into semantic and syntactic aspects in the domain of the argument structure of verbs of possession and location in the urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo), and S & atilde;o Tom & eacute; and Principe (S & atilde;o Tom & eacute;), which are at different stages of an ongoing nativization process and historically in contactwith different languages and typologies. This editorial places the content and contribution of the papers in this special collection within the wider context of the relatively young and fast-growing field of research on African varieties of Portuguese. It briefly addresses the sociohistorical and linguistic background in which these varieties emerged, the state of research, and the factors that have played a pivotal role in the debate on the linguistic properties and language variation, in particular the role of language contact, general principles of grammar, and schooling.
Both Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) permit definite third-person null direct objects (DOs) in anaphoric contexts, but differ with regard to the overt DO variant, with the former variety favoring tonic pronouns, the latter clitics. Previous research on language production has shown that the choice between variants in both varieties is constrained by semantic-pragmatic features such as animacy and specificity. We analyze speaker evaluation of these forms in EP and BP, using an experimental acceptability judgment task in which stimuli varied according to DO variant, animacy, and specificity. Data are drawn from the evaluative responses (n= 1752) of 215 Portuguese-speaking participants. Our results demonstrate that the null variant is evaluated most positively overall in both varieties. For EP and BP respectively, the clitic and tonic variants were evaluated most positively with animate specific referents. Our findings show that the patterns of variation previously found in production are reflected in gradient evaluations of anaphoric DOs in EP and BP. This provides support for the hypothesis that in the shift from clitic to tonic DO pronouns in BP, the overt tonic variant has preferentially taken on the same properties of the former clitic DOs.
This paper investigates the polyfunctionality of two Romance adverbial elements: Italian un po' 'a bit' and European Portuguese l & aacute; 'there'. Both adverbs display various uses: some of them have a bearing on the propositional level of the sentence, while others have a bearing on the management of the information conveyed by the utterance, or on the performance of speech acts. By describing the different contexts of use of the adverbs, their meaning variation is examined, and a functional categorization is laid out. Subsequently, relying on the layered model of grammatical categories proposed by Functional Discourse Grammar, the distinction between uses that relate to illocutionary force modification and uses that relate to information management is reassessed, and the interplay between these functional domains is discussed.
This paper investigates the two main belief (or doxastic) verbs acreditar and crer in European and Brazilian Portuguese. The focus of the study is on the selection patterns of these two verbs, taking into account semantic as well as syntactic aspects. Studying the selectional peculiarities of finite and non-finite structures in both varieties from a qualitative and quantitative perspective sheds light on a modal domain that is prone to a high degree of variation, both on an intra-linguistic and an inter-linguistic level, and therefore reflects micro-typological variation in the Portuguese language and in Romance as a whole. In particular, we intend verify whether the selection of finite and non-finite inflected complements may constitute case of intra-linguistic differentiation between these two major varieties, i.e. a dynamic that points to language evolution and change in contemporary Portuguese. Our analysis is based Davies' Web/Dialects sub-corpus, which enables a search for selection patterns determined different person-marked matrix forms, namely acredito/acredita and creio/cr & ecirc;. The comparative study shows that there are clear quantitative differences in the selection of complement clause patterns with respect to both finite and non-finite, particularly inflected, structures. Of particular interest are the peculiarities and contrasts in mood alternations from a comparative perspective, as they reflect different dynamics of evolution within the contemporary language system. This specific part of the study is completed by a regression analysis of the quantitative data on mood alternations, assessing the statistical significance of crucial predictive factors. The final section summarizes the main findings of the study.
In this paper, we explore incoordinate sentences with mas ('but', in English) in European Portuguese (EP). These sentences are characterized by the presence of a conjunction attached to a single sentence, occurring in the position of a second conjunct. We take up on the work of Giorgi (2016, 2018), Kuteva et al (2017) and Niclot (2018), and propose a syntactic analysis for incoordinate sentences. Our data shows that, in EP, there are two types of incoordinate sentences, depending on their independence, i.e., incoordination stage. In both cases, mas is a conjunction and not a discourse marker, which heads a ConjP. But, to capture its correlation with discourse, it should be connected with a discourse configuration as the one suggested by Cinque (2008) and Giorgi (2016, 2018). Thus, with this investigation we aim at providing a more adequate description of paratactic constructions, the levels of integration that can be associated to coordinate/incoordinate sentences in European Portuguese, and the status of conjunctions that occur in them.
This paper analyses the expression of habitual values in Portuguese, focusing on the auxiliary verb costumar 'use to'. First, the concept of habituality (and its distinction from genericity, frequentativity, and iterativity) is discussed, and an overview of the various ways of signalling habituality in Portuguese is provided. Then, three topics take centre stage, one concerning tense and two concerning the interaction of costumar with temporal adjuncts of different types. With regard to tense, the versatility of the imperfective past of costumar is examined, noting that this tense form can convey values which are typically reserved to the perfective past and the pluperfect. Regarding the interaction with adjuncts, the combination of costumar with adjuncts that redundantly express habituality (e.g., habitualmente 'usually') is first addressed. Subsequently, the combination of costumarwith a set of allied adjuncts, grouped under the cover term 'frequentative', is scrutinized. These include adjuncts that indicate whether exceptions to the habitual pattern are more or less frequent (e.g., muitas vezes 'often' vs. & agrave;s vezes 'sometimes'), and adjuncts expressing correlation between eventualities, frequency sensu stricto, or cyclicity (e.g., uma vez por semana 'once a week'). Portuguese is systematically compared with English throughout the text. The neo-Reichenbachian framework of Discourse Representation Theory (Hans Kamp) is used for formal analyses.
