Nos últimos quinze ou vinte anos, várias equipes de pesquisadores vêm se dedicando , à tarefa de resgatar do esquecimento e disponibilizar à pesquisa o que foi conservado dos escritos produzidos  no Brasil desde o tempo da Brasil-colônia. Meu primeiro contato com esses materiais (com uma amostra deles) ocorreu há cerca de dez anos, graças […]

Interactional Linguistics, or the study of language in social interaction, is a radically empirical enterprise that depends crucially on the close analysis of recorded data from talk-in-interaction (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). Its scope is thus constrained by the accessibility of recorded materials, making it difficult to study language use at earlier periods in time. Investigating […]

‘Or’ seems basic and universal, but where does it actually come from? According to typologists (Giacalone Ramat and Mauri, 2011) not all languages have a lexical ‘or’. Moreover, languages that do have ‘or’ reveal a number of distinct etymological sources, predominantly markers involving ‘irrealis’ (e.g., Question particles, ‘if’s, and dubitatives). Using synchronic data, mostly from […]

The framework, postcolonial pragmatics, emerged about a decade (Anchimbe & Janney 2011a, b, 2018). It builds on the reality that most western pragmatic monocultural and individualistic-based frameworks are insufficient in accounting for interactive phenomena in collectivist postcolonial contexts. Designed on the specimen of the history and societal set up of postcolonial communities, postcolonial pragmatics operates […]

A universidade pública brasileira incomoda. Creio haver razões profundas para isso, que ultrapassam o embate político mais imediato. Primeiro, universidades são um lugar singular. Segundo, convivem em nosso país com um déficit duplo de representação e representatividade. Terceiro, por essa falta, esse déficit, elas se movem, desafiadas a realizar (ou não) um modelo radical de […]

Like birds born to chirp, humans are born to parse, predisposed to assign linguistic structures to what they hear.  This yields a view of language variation quite different from one based on parameters defined at UG. This approach to language acquisition makes two contributions to Minimalist thinking.  First, it minimizes the pre-wired components of internal […]

O propósito desta mesa é apresentar as mais importantes vertentes dos estudos fonológicos fundadas a partir da segunda metade do século passado e que, ainda hoje, vicejam promovendo inúmeras investigações e análises teóricas. Para tanto, convidamos a Profa. Carmen Matzenauer para tratar da Fonologia Gerativa, a Profa. Luciani Tenani para expor sobre a Fonologia Prosódica […]

Paul Grice famously made a distinction between sentence meaning (the properties of a sentence assigned to it by the grammar) and speaker’s meaning (what the speaker intended to communicate by uttering a sentence).  This distinction is arguably at the core of Experimental Pragmatics, which is a discipline devoted to (a) testing pragmatic theories (and often […]

La linguistique historique  romane à l’heure actuelle se voit enrichie du matériel varié et puisé des sources multiples (bases des données, corpus, publications des textes y compris des fac-similés etc ). Ajoutons-y les resultats des recherches des disciplines confinantes (histoire, ethnologie, paléographie). C’est ce qui permet d’appliquer à la sociolinguistique diachronique  les paroles de J.-P.  […]