This paper investigates a feature that is attested in many varieties of English, but that has never been examined using accountable, quantitative methods: variation between the prepositions up/down/over/out to + geographical place name, as in (1) and bare to + place name, as in (2). The goal is to determine whether social or linguistic constrain the choice of form. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 58 speakers of English (stratified by age and gender) in two understudied, rural communities, one in northern Ontario, Canada (Parry Sound), the other in northern Maine, USA (Oakfield).
(1) So we went up/down/over/out to Millinocket.
(2) Sometimes we go to Patten, there’s a nice store over there.
All instances of the variable were extracted from the data using AntConc (Anthony 2012). Non-geographical places names, such as private residences, businesses, and schools were excluded, yielding 272 tokens. Each token was coded for social and linguistic factors that were hypothesized to constrain the variation, including presence of preposition, lexical preposition (i.e. up, down, over, out, ∅), cardinal direction of destination (North, East, South, and West), community (Ontario, Maine), age (younger, middle-aged, older), perceived gender (men, women), and education (some postsecondary education, no post-secondary education). Then, the data was analyzed using distributional methods and conditional inference trees (see also AUTHOR 2013).
Results show striking commonalities between the two communities: Speakers use the forms up to and down to to indicate movement north and south, respectively, yet over to and down to are used for all cardinal directions. A qualitative analysis of tokens reveals that the over and down tend to be used when talking about nearby destinations, such as the next town as in (3), while up/down are used for far away destinations, such as a distant province, as in (4):
(3) Well, we go over to Patten quite a bit.
(4) Um we went and did a similar thing, drove out to BC.
Elevation may also play a role, with one speaker using up to to refer to a destination in the south that is highly elevated. In both varieties, men use the prepositions up/down/over/out to more frequently than women; however, there is a difference in the age profile of these speakers. In Ontario, prepositions are mostly used by older speakers, while in Maine they are more frequent among younger ones. There are also notable differences in frequency; Ontarians use up/down/over/out at higher rates than Mainers (29.2% vs. 10.2%), potentially due to a more grid-like orientation to their community. Taken together, the findings suggest that this variable may be an ideal testing ground to explore the role of place, type of landscape and topography on language use (see also Forker 2020).

Folklore can evoke monstrous causes for disease, e.g., witches spreading plague (Brooks) or vampires bringing porphyria and tuberculosis (Lane; Ponti). Or conversely, that contagion creates monsters, like the zombies in Ling Ma’s Severance and Stephen King’s The Cell. But even in the realm of prosaic illnesses like colds, pneumonia, and flu, myths and urban legends shape how their spread is predicted and infection can be avoided. Word choice, however, can help keep a myth in circulation.

Anthropologists have documented and othered ideas found across Latin America (Weller) and China (Zhu et al.) about cold temperatures causing illnesses. But this connection is pervasive in American folklore as well (Keeley). Catching a cold, in particular, can be tracked through centuries of vernacular writing from Samuel Pepys’s diary (Gyford) to Benjamin Franklin’s letters (Green) to Joyce Carol Oates’ memoirs, considering whether being cold or wet leads to developing a cold. Earlier studies surveyed respondents for their ranking of belief in particular health myths (Burgoon & Hall; Cozma). Here I seek unsolicited traces of such myths in vernacular corpus data. 20th/21stth century corpus excerpts from vernacular health discussions further reveal that this trope is contemporaneously instantiated as both a causal claim, as in (a), and its myth-busting counter-claim, as in (b).

a) “barefoot on winter nights: If you catch cold and die from cold feet, you’ll be put into a box and buried deep, deep under the ground.” (Sewanee Review, 1990)

b) “You know, you don’t get a cold by going out in the cold weather after a shower despite
what my mother told me.” (CBS Sunday Morning, 2002)

Both types strengthen the connection, however; for as George Lakoff observes, “When we negate a frame, you evoke the frame” (3). Indeed, Heath et al. note that urban legends are “prominent in the social environment, they have achieved their prominence because people often regard them as true” (1029).

The pervasive polysemous cold/cold connection in English is also found cross-linguistically, with morphologically related pairs encoding the low temperature connection to disease: frio/resfriarse (Spanish); froid/predre froid (French); freddo/de prendere un rafreddore (Italian); koud/verkouden (Dutch); kalt/sich erkälten (German); студ/ простудиться (Russian).

Furthermore, catching-a-cold myths extend to not just the base cold/cold pairing, but to semantically related referents of both the cause and the effect. Corpus data depicts feeling cold leading to: a cold/being sick/pneumonia/a fever/your death. While causes discussed include being cold, chilled, having wet hair or wet clothes, in a draft, or having a bare head or bare feet. Shivering from chilliness, then, is conflated with shivering from fever, encouraging lay people, whether medieval or contemporary, to bypass ideas of bacterial and viral transmission, and attribute illnesses to visible, controllable states of the body.

Syntactic priming is a phenomenon in which the processing of a syntactic structure facilitates the subsequent processing of the same syntactic structure. Syntactic priming effects have been observed in different languages, during both production and comprehension. In Brazilian Portuguese (BP) syntactic priming effects have been found in comprehension studies with children with dyslexia and children with reading difficulties. In the present study, we used a self-paced reading task in order to investigate the effects of syntactic priming during the comprehension of passive sentences by adult native speakers of BP. Twenty-two participants read target passive sentences in experimental and control conditions, with verb repetition between prime and target in both conditions. Our results show that participants read target sentences faster in the experimental than in the control condition. These findings indicate that, at least in part, the processing of passive voice was facilitated by repeated exposure to the syntactic structure. We interpret these results as evidence of syntactic persistence and residual activation.

Because of public policies for inclusion, the Brazilian educational system has expanded in the past decade and has changed the profile of students. College students’ migration to a new community expanded their contact with different varieties of languages. A study in a sample constituted by sociolinguistic interviews with undergraduates from the Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil, balanced for the degree of mobility, time in the course, and gender identification (n=60) controlled three morphosyntactic variable features:
– 3p verbal agreement: standard, as in “Os meninos estuda-m”, or non-standard, as in “Os meninos estuda-0”.
– Preposition in locative complement of movement verbs: the standard prepositions “a” and “para”, as in “Eu vou a-Prep a universidade” and “Eu vou para-Prep a universidade”, and the non-standard preposition “em”, as in “Eu vou em-Prep a Universidade” (I go to-Prep university).
– Determiner position of possessive phrases: The presence or absence of the article in the determiner position (D) before possessives, as in “Eu vi o-(D) seu irmão” (I saw the-(D) your brother) and “Eu vi 0-(D) seu irmão” (I see 0-(D) your brother).
The mean rates of D-absence, verbal agreement, and standard preposition (PrepP) by students were computed and compared with the effect of students’ gender, time of course, and displacement profile. Seeking patterns of behavior of individuals concerning the three variables, a cluster analysis using K-medoids identified four groups with different grammatical patterns. Group#1 is the smallest, with four students joined by the smallest mean rate of PrepP (M=38.53,SD=12.44), D-absence (M=72.39,SD=13.39) and verbal agreement (M=95.65,SD=3.63) above global rates. A single common feature among these students is that they are beginners, and none is from Alagoas. Group#2 is the biggest, with thirty students joined by a high mean rate of PrepP (M=91.73,SD=9.88), D-absence (M=64.16,SD=8.79) above the global rate and a verbal agreement mean rate nearly categorical (M=99.45,SD=1.19). This group is balanced in gender and time of course. Most students are from Sergipe than Alagoas and Bahia. Group#3 computes eleven students joined by the highest mean rate of standard preposition in PrepP (M=93.79,SD=8.03), D-absence (M= 62.07,SD=11.26) above the global rate and the smallest mean rate of verbal agreement (M=88.07, SD=6.72). In this group predominate beginners, men, and people from Alagoas. Group#4 computes fourteen students joined by the smallest mean rate of D-absence (M=35.69,SD=13.21), the mean rate of PrepP (M=79.58,SD=15.37) below the global rate and the verbal agreement mean rate nearly categorical (M=99.23,SD=1.70). Most of the students in this group are from Bahia and the enders. These results highlight the role of the university as an inclusive and integrative field for linguistic variation in Brazilian Portuguese, with effects on the normative orientation of grammatical patterns.

Vamos relacionar as marcas de textualidade (CAVALCANTE e BRITO, 2019, 2018), (CAVALCANTE et al, 2020) e a desqualificação do outro (AMOSSY, 2019), dentro de um corpus específico do ambiente digital, a fim de relacionar as reflexões às características próprias do tecnodiscurso. Paveau (2017) propõe uma integração entre o “tecno” e o “discurso” entendendo os dois sistemas como simbióticos na produção tecnodiscursiva. Nosso objetivo é analisar a desqualificação do outro através da textualidade dos acontecimentos discursivos morais desencadeados por enunciados violentos, denominados por Paveau (2017) como ciberviolência. Para dar estofo teórico à análise da violência e desqualificação do outro, elegemos os pressupostos de argumentação de Amossy (2017) e Duarte (2021), Fiorin (2015). Para mostrar como se desenvolve a ciberviolência no ambiente tecnolinguageiro, selecionamos 02 interações que envolveram a modalidade argumentativa polêmica, ambientadas no Twitter @Gleisi. Essa escolha se deu pelo engajamento dos usuários nas postagens políticas da deputada federal, Gleisi Hoffmman. Além dos parâmetros técnicos (Paveau,2017), da constituição do próprio ambiente tecnológico, que caracteriza o conjunto de fenômenos agressivos sob o viés dos tecnodiscursos, como o ciberassédio, a ciberdiscussão e o ciberbullying, será igualmente considerada a dimensão de textualidade, atentando para a referenciação e a intertextualidade como marcas de estratégias para a desqualificação do outro. Mostramos que as competências linguageiras e os textos produzidos pelos internautas a partir da ecologia tecnodiscursiva, estão integrados em um dispositivo comum baseado em uma materialidade única, porém compósita, o ambiente tecnodiscursivo com foco nas incidências repetidas de ciberviolência envolvendo comentários insultuosos e desqualificando a pessoa, marcadas através de uma rede referencial e intertextual.

As relações interpessoais do século XXI não podem ser estudadas sem o papel das ferramentas tecnológicas, sobretudo após o início da pandemia decorrente do novo coronavírus, em que a internet passou a ser ainda mais utilizada pela sociedade de forma geral para as atividades do dia a dia. Ao navegarem, principalmente dentro das redes sociais, os sujeitos não recebem passivamente as informações. Eles têm, com considerável facilidade, o papel de “escrileitor”, conforme proposto por Paveau (2017) – leem e escrevem sobre o que está em circulação. Tal conjuntura permite a determinados teóricos defenderem a indissociabilidade entre as ações sociais do homem e a máquina atualmente. Desse modo, pesquisadores da Linguística Aplicada e da Linguística Textual, conscientes dessa ebulição de possibilidades frente às telas dos aparelhos eletrônicos, vêm tentando lançar uma lupa, cada vez mais atualizada, sobre esse verdadeiro fenômeno que é considerado a WEB e que permite um imbricamento de linguagens nunca antes presenciado. Na esteira dessa inovação, o TikTok, mídia social chinesa, é uma plataforma popular com muitos recursos tecnológicos, permitindo a criação e circulação de práticas comunicativas que possibilitam o debate de diversas temáticas. À vista disso, esta pesquisa objetiva refletir sobre como os discursos presentes nesse ambiente virtual instigam e contribuem para a (des)construção dos pontos de vista e argumentos dos usuários a respeito de dois movimentos sociais: negro e feminista. A partir de um referencial teórico composto por estudos de Bakhtin (2016), Lévy (1999), Volóchinov (2013, 2017) e Xavier (2002), 50 comentários, coletados das postagens dos vídeos de 21 contas, são analisados, a fim de se realizar interpretações sobre os diferentes posicionamentos presentes nesses processos enunciativos tomados como objeto de estudo. Por meio dos resultados obtidos, conclui-se que, ao se constituir como uma arena discursiva, o TikTok corrobora para discursos performativos acerca dos dois grupos sócio-históricos e identitários observados, fazendo com que os interlocutores, os quais sempre assumem papéis ativos-responsivos, efetuem o processo do letramento crítico defendido por Janks (2018), seja para ratificar uma ideia ou refutá-la.

Situated within the variationist sociolinguistic framework, this study has focused on the qualitative analysis of structures in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) that resemble other syntactic phenomena, such as preposition stranding in English and orphaning in French — i.e., respectively, “é algo que vale a pena conversar sobre” and “e se quiser dormir, tem três quartos a casa, pode escolher qualquer um para”. Based on a corpus of Tweets extracted and compiled through R, we examined a sample of twenty thousand Tweets in order to identify the potential envelope(s) of variation. In other words, this sample provided data to also explore when the stranded variant could have occurred but did not and when it could not have happened without loss of semantic equivalence between sentences. Thus, this has allowed us to evaluate which factors regulate the use of the stranded variant in comparison with other strategies. The partial results of this research suggest that there are two envelopes of variation: one with four relativization strategies and, in constructions different from relative clauses, another in which there are only two variants besides the phrase-final preposition one. Regarding relative clauses, the following are the three other relativization strategies: the standard variant (“é algo sobre o que vale a pena conversar”), the resumptive pronoun variant (“é algo que vale a pena conversar sobre isso”) and the prepositional phrase-chopping variant (“é algo que vale a pena conversar”). Although there is the issue of data scarcity when analyzing this type of syntactic phenomena, our findings suggest that sentences with the stranded preposition “sobre” are more frequent and acceptable than others with “com”, “de”, or “para”. There is also a hypothesis of common ground being one of the determining factors for the possibility of phrase-final prepositions occurring in BP. Finally, this study aims to contribute to a broader discussion of syntactic variation, which is still a very controversial topic within Variationist Sociolinguistics.

Esse trabalho tem como objetivo o estudo dos usos de ainda a partir da análise de posts de redes sociais, em especial de tweets. A escolha desse objeto de pesquisa se deu a partir de reflexões ocorridas em sala de aula com jovens estudantes e trabalhadores de diferentes regiões do estado do Rio de Janeiro. Em uma de nossas aulas, nos deparamos com relatos de ainda tido como uma “nova gíria” carioca e fluminense, que funcionava como marcador discursivo de (re)afirmação. A partir desse fenômeno, buscamos compreender como ainda, comumente tido como advérbio temporal, passa a ter valor semântico-pragmático de afirmação e função discursiva. Para tanto, analisamos dados reais de uso da língua e adotamos o Funcionalismo e a Linguística Centrada no Uso (LCU) como modelo teórico e metodológico de pesquisa. A utilização do Twitter como principal corpus se deu porque buscamos usos nos quais o contexto sociocomunicativo seja de espontaneidade, maior informalidade e com a presença de falantes/escreventes jovens. Após a coleta de dados, fizemos a análise qualitativa, que consiste na observação dos níveis morfossintáticos, discursivo e semântico-pragmático. Aliada a esse processo foi a revisão bibliográfica, que nos auxiliou a elencar e a agrupar os usos de ainda. Encontramos 90 ocorrências de usos de ainda agrupados em , ao menos, três funções sintático-discursivas (adverbial, conexão e discursiva) e seis valores semântico-pragmáticos (tempo/aspecto, contraste, inclusão, concessão, ilocução, marcador textual). Portanto, considerando os fenômenos de gramaticalização, amplamente estudado pelos funcionalistas, e os processos de domínio geral, defendidos pela Linguística Centrada no Uso, entendemos que ainda está emergindo em novas categorias, notadamente, mais gramaticais, e estabelecendo novos usos na língua.

Does knowing the person who gives you feedback change the way you accept or refuse that feedback? This is the question that motivated our study that compared the effectiveness and perception of anonymous and conference peer feedback on the writing of learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This piece of research had 24 participants who attended two classes of EAL at upper-intermediate level in an extension project at a university in Brazil. Both groups were experimental. One group engaged with asynchronous peer feedback via email only, and the other also had a peer conference (face-to-face interaction) after receiving the feedback via email. Data, collected over one semester, encompassed first drafts, peer feedback, and revised drafts of an argumentative essay along with responses to a perception questionnaire. The results showed that both types of feedback were effective to a similar extent, although they differed on how it was processed. While peer conferences were seen as an opportunity for learners to clarify outstanding feedback issues, they did arouse some hostility. Deindividuation, the feeling individuals have when in groups, seemed to foster more feedback among anonymous reviewers. Furthermore, the study found that learners seem to pay more attention to peer feedback than to teacher feedback because of the uncertainty it generates, which might enhance noticing. This uncertainty was perceived as a trigger for further scrutiny and research on the feedback received. Based on the analysis, we argue that there is room for both types of feedback in the EAL classroom. However, the anonymous type, which is the least common, could be an interesting option for developing learners language abilities without the pressure of face-to-face meetings.

A presença cada vez mais numerosa de estudantes surdos em todos os níveis e modalidades da educação brasileira tem feito crescer, substancialmente, nas duas últimas décadas, a demanda pela criação de sinais em Libras, tanto para nomear conceitos referentes às diferentes áreas do conhecimento, quanto para designar autores destacados nessas áreas. Em decorrência, vem se ampliando também a produção de obras lexicográficas para registro e divulgação desses novos itens lexicais. Entre os trabalhos com esse objetivo, localiza-se o Manuário Acadêmico e Escolar, produto resultante da investigação de um grupo de pesquisa do Departamento de Ensino Superior (DESU) do Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos (INES), composto de docentes, discentes e intérpretes de Libras da instituição, além de colaboradores externos. Trata-se de um dicionário terminológico bilíngue (Libras-Português), online, contendo termos da área da Pedagogia e das disciplinas do Ensino Básico. Os sinais referentes a esses termos são coletados junto à comunidade surda do INES (estudantes, professores e intérpretes) e validados por uma equipe de docentes surdos do Instituto. Nos encontros realizados com esses profissionais para apresentação e avaliação dos sinais coletados, observamos a existência de critérios governando o processo de validação. Tais critérios parecem estar associados a propriedades estruturais da Libras, à iconicidade do sinal e à quantidade de itens de um sinal composto, sendo possível a aceitação de mais de um sinal para o mesmo conceito teórico e para o mesmo autor. Em constante elaboração e aprimoramento, o Manuário divulga, atualmente, em seu site, um acervo de cerca de mil e duzentos sinais, filmados e organizados de acordo com cada área do conhecimento, sendo que, desse total, uma centena corresponde a sinais para autores cuja apresentação se dá em verbetes bilíngues elaborados em linguagem televisiva, dinâmica e original. Em artigo publicado em periódico acadêmico relatamos e refletimos sobre todo esse percurso de pesquisa, sugerindo, em diálogo com outros autores, possíveis contribuições para a Lexicografia Terminológica da Libras.