Com o avanço constante da tecnologia, o campo digital tem sido terreno fértil para os estudos linguísticos. O tecnodiscurso, enquanto lugar das produções tecnolinguageiras, traz particularidades que precisam ser levadas em consideração por linguistas, principalmente quando partem de teorias e métodos pré-digitais para o estudo desse ambiente tecnodiscursivo. Nesse contexto, este trabalho, assumindo uma abordagem pós-dualista e ecológica, conforme Paveau (2017), reflete sobre o uso de tecnotextos como corpus nos estudos em Linguística Textual (doravante LT). Para tanto, partindo da noção de texto que sustentamos, baseada em Cavalcante et alii (2019), discutimos a noção de ambiente (PAVEAU, 2015, 2017) e os lugares dos atores no campo digital (EMERIT, 2016) e buscamos repensar a postura do pesquisador da LT para lidar com corpora compósitos e instáveis, e também idiodigitais. Essas discussões nos permitiram chegar a algumas conclusões sobre uma operação metodológica a ser assumida, ou reforçada, para tratar dos tecnotextos, em seus devidos ambientes, como corpus. Em primeiro lugar, a necessidade de adotar a postura metodológica de pesquisador-usuário, que conhece e domina, até certo ponto, o ambiente no qual constrói sua pesquisa, atentando-se às particularidades estruturais e funcionais desse ambiente e ao modo como esses aspectos colaboram na construção de sentidos. Em segundo lugar, a importância de compreender que lidaremos sempre com um corpus idiodigital, pois estaremos diante de ambientes, em certa medida, personalizados a partir de nossos rastros, que são constantemente processados pelos algoritmos, o que reforça mais uma vez a ideia de um pesquisador participante do ecossistema. Por fim, a imprescindibilidade de descrever os ambientes com os quais lidamos, ainda que partindo de “congelamentos focalizados”, como modo de caracterizá-los em um determinado instante, mas também de garantir a consideração desses ambientes (e de suas características) nas explicações das estratégias de textualização.

In speech perception, especially in speech interaction, it is necessary to quickly integrate the top-down acoustic signal with lexical knowledge and bottom-up context. The interactive activation hypothesis goes further by proposing that forward flow and feedback in connected bidirectional neural networks allows humans to approach the optimal integration of bottom-up restrictions and top-down information in acoustic speech processing. In this mechanism, online feedback is almost unnecessary for monolingual speakers, as the noise in the bottom-up transmission is almost zero. However, the noise of bottom-up decoding is higher for non-native speakers, given the mixed representation between the categories of L2 and L1 in the bilingual phonological inventory. Therefore, I hypothesize that the lexical feedback mechanism is the main means of understanding speech by bilinguals. I will present a series of experiments that investigate the processing of word accent at sublexical and lexical levels in perception and production by monolingual and (late consecutive) bilingual speakers using experimental psycholinguistics methods, such as measuring latency times in word naming and the eye tracking technique with the use of the Visual World Paradigm with printed words, in addition to perception tests and production of acoustic phonetics. The experiments were applied to 120 participants among monolingual speakers of American English and bilingual speakers of American English and Brazilian Portuguese. Results indicate the predominance of the lexical feedback mechanism in bilingual comprehension, since the acoustic input is decoded by mixed bilingual systems of phonological representations of L1 and L2 with observed dominance of the phonological system of L1.

Neste trabalho, apontam-se evidências de validade de uma tarefa de compreensão de provérbios, que faz parte de um teste maior de linguagem figurada. Sob a perspectiva da Linguística Cognitiva, provérbios são um fenômeno da linguagem figurada baseado em três prismas: linguístico, cognitivo e cultural. Trata-se de um fenômeno linguístico, visto que é uma figura da linguagem; cognitivo, visto que reflete nossos processos cognitivos; e cultural, já que nessa junção de linguagem e cognição ocorre o processamento e a assimilação de uma moral. Consequentemente, os provérbios são um fenômeno de alta complexidade, compostos por sentenças fixas que fazem parte do conhecimento cultural de uma comunidade linguística. Considerando os aspectos teóricos do fenômeno e levando em conta pressupostos psicométricos, este trabalho tem como objetivo sugerir evidências de validade de uma tarefa de compreensão de provérbios. Para tanto, um estudo experimental foi realizado. Nele, analisamos a compreensão de provérbios em diferentes grupos etários (crianças, adolescentes e adultos). A tarefa em processo de validação foi aplicada a 412 participantes da região da Serra do Rio Grande do Sul. Além da idade, a escolaridade, o tipo de pergunta, e os próprios itens foram variáveis consideradas no estudo. Através dos resultados, verificou-se que a habilidade de compreensão de provérbios se desenvolve gradualmente, com efeito significativo da idade e da escolaridade dos participantes. Também foram verificadas diferenças significativas entre os tipos de pergunta realizados e entre os próprios provérbios. Através desses resultados, evidências de validade baseadas em conteúdo e em processos de resposta foram sugeridas. Por fim, os resultados indicam um instrumento confiável e capaz de medir com sensibilidade a compreensão de provérbios.

This paper presents a phonetic-perceptual multimodal analysis of the intonation of assertive, echo-question, wh-exclamation and wh-question utterances in Brazilian Portuguese. It aims at analyzing the auditory and visual recognition of these four types of utterances and their specific pragmatic values. Ten speakers (five female) from Rio de Janeiro were recorded and filmed. In the first stage, the production of the utterances is described both acoustically – in relation to the fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration parameters – and visually, in terms of Action Units. The analysis indicates the existence of acoustic and visual cues that distinguish these pragmatic meanings manifested through intonation. It is primarily the acoustic paremeter of F0, and secondarily the intensity paremeter, which most clearly differentiate the four intonational contours. Regarding facial gestures, we verified that, while head movements and blinking were used for the production of assertion, head and eyebrow movements were used for wh-questions, and head, eyebrow and lip movements for the production of wh-exclamations. In the second stage, an audiovisual perceptual test was applied to sixty listeners, through the presentation of stimuli in three modalities: audio only (A), video only (V) and audio combined with video (AV). The audiovisual perceptual tests support the view that the four utterance types are recognized in audiovisual (AV), auditory (A) and visual (V) modalities, – excluding the visually presented echo-question in the latter situation, due to the fact that this utterance type did not present coherent facial gestures in our data. This differs from other results reported in the literature on audiovisual prosody. More importantly, we verified that the visual channel is not only integrated in the perception of assertions, questions and exclamations, but also that it has a special role in contributing to the robustness of perception in contexts with ambiguous information.

Code-Switching (CS) has been defined in distinct ways (e.g. Clyne 2003). In general, the CS is an activity which may be observed in the speech -or writing- of bilinguals who go back and forth between their two languages in the same conversation (Deuchar 2013). The CS can occur inter- or intra- clauses in the same bilingual speech. The intraclausal CS gained strength in the 1980s when the focus of the investigation was the linguistic dimension between two grammatical systems (e.g. Pfaff 1979; Poplack 1980, 1981; Sridhar and Sridhar 1980). The asymmetry and systematicity between two grammatical systems in contact were captured in the notions of Matrix Language (ML) and Embedded Language (EL) introduced by Joshi (1982). These initial notions were taken up in the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model proposed by Myers-Scotton (1993) and maintained in subsequent revisions to its model (2002). The MLF has been applied to analyze bilingual speech in adults (e.g. Blokzijl, Deuchar, and Parafita Couto 2017) and with some analytical modifications in children (e.g. Lanza 1997; Vihman 1998; Paradis, Nicoladis, and Genesee 2000) in different language pairs. Despite its usefulness, it has received criticism due to the difficulty of identifying ML (Bullock et al. 2018), especially in children (e.g. Lanza 1997). This work focuses on the ML of intra-clause CS in children and adults in bilingual data Venetian (VEC)/Spanish (SPA). The VEC language is a minority language in Puebla, Mexico, since 1882, due to the arrival of Italian immigrants, most from the Veneto region, Northern Italy. The purpose of this work is the identification of the ML in the monolingual and bilingual clauses in a family interaction based on the MLF model. Bilingual clauses are clauses with intra-clause CS: the ML of the bilingual clauses can be VEC or SPA. Monolingual clauses are clauses expressed in only one language: the ML of VEC monolingual clauses is VEC, while the ML of SPA monolingual clauses is SPA. We take the clause as the analysis unit and the ML as a dependent variable to achieve two goals: (1) to describe the relative role of the VEC/SPA languages in the bilingual speech of adults and children, and (2) to compare the ML in the bilingual and monolingual clauses of children and adults. In this study, we analyzed nine recordings with 8:48:23 hours of natural speech conversation in play situations in a context familiar. The age range of two younger children is 3;02,07-3;09,00, and of the older sister is 6;04,13-7;06,01. The MLF model has not been used to analyze the VEC language in contact with another language. Moreover, this is the first work where it is analyzed the VEC / SPA intra-clause CS in both the bilingual speech of adults and children. Preliminary results show that the ML of most of the bilingual clauses is VEC in both adults and children and that in the latter, there have been several cases where it has not been possible to determine the ML of the clause from the MLF model.

Passive alternations and dative alternations have typically been seen as rather different, because English has special verbal marking of passives, but no applicative marking of either of the dative alternants. However, from a cross-linguistic perspective, both can be understood as variants that respond to differences in the referential prominence of two arguments: The arguments A and P (agent and patient) in the case of passive alternations, and R and T (recipient and theme) in the case of dative alternations. In addition to passives (defined as including verbal marking), languages may also have alternants where the agent gets oblique coding but the verb is unmarked, and in addition to dative alternations, languages may of course have applicatives, where there is special marking on the verb.

What unites all these construction types, I claim, is the role of unusual associations of role rank (A > P, R > T) and referential prominence (person prominence: 1/2 > 3, nominality prominence: personal pronoun > full nominal, animacy: animate > inanimate, definiteness: definite > indefinite, givenness: given > new). Unusual associations may lead to special coding, but usual associations are never coded in a special way. This is just like in differential object marking (DOM), where it is well known that we get special accusative markers (e.g. the Spanish preposition a) when the P has high referential prominence. The broader explanation appeals to frequency-induced predictability and efficient coding: When there is variability, languages tend to choose shorter expressions (in lexicon and grammar) for more predictable situations.

Specifically, I will talk about (and cite evidence for) the following universals:
U1: If there is special verbal marking in a passive alternation, it is found on the passive verb, and if there is special flagging, it is found on the passive agent.
U2: If there is special marking in a dative alternation, it is found on the R argument.
U3: If there is special marking in a DOM construction, it is found on the animate/definite/1st+2nd person argument.

Analogous statements can also be made about applicative constructions. Thus, the idea of unusual associations of role rank and referential prominence (which is fairly old for DOM) can be shown to have much broader applicability.

The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D’Urville. He collected comparative word lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of the relation among languages. The method used by modern glottochronology, developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s, measures distances from the percentage of shared cognates, which are words with a common historical origin. Recently, this study will propose a method when it gets into an application that uses normalized Levenshtein distance among words with the same meaning and averages on the words contained in a list. In related studies by several researchers proposed an advanced method of the intended method including a second normalization. In this project, we will compare the different dialects of the Arabic Language to decide on which is the closest to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to decide which of the two closely related dialects can be applied with greater success to resolve relationships among languages.
Expected results will show the most accurate dialect to MSA that can be used as a reference to anyone interested in reading or writing in the Arabic language that can be generalized as much as people and not to be specified for a specific group of people and excluding those who can find a problem understanding the full message while using the least used or far terms and words from the common knowledge of the Arabic language. And that closer related Dialects have smaller distance and spread through the Arab world. This means that not only do they have more similar words for the same meaning, but the general occurrence and order of characters in words is more similar. That will also provide a slight insight to think about the future of the language if it is turning towards global spread or attrition, by comparing the number of the places and its speakers for each of the main Dialects representing the Arabic Language that will be selected.
References
D. D’Urville, Sur les ˆıles du Grand Oc´ean, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de
Go´egraphie 17, (1832), 1-21.
Keywords: lexical distance, dialects, Arabic language, phonotactic features.

Aims: How does speaking two languages lead to language change? Hypothesis: Speakers repeat grammatical structures they have just used or heard/read (priming). We explore this mechanism in milliseconds and its long-term effects throughout years.

Methodology: We use cross-dialectal data to observe language change (Study 1) and experimental data to measure cross-language priming for the bilingual speaker (Study 2). We test adjective-noun order (e.g. blue dog vs dog blue) in Romani (Indic language), a language in centuries-long contact with Romanian (Romance language).

Study 1: We analysed 3,000 adjective-noun orders in the responses of 119 Romani speakers to a linguistic questionnaire. Respondents translated sentences from their country’s official language into Romani. All data are available on the Romani Morphosyntax database.

We found that Romani speakers use ADJ-N order when they speak languages with ADJ-N order (e.g. Slavic). But when they speak a language with N-ADJ order (e.g. Romance), we see an increase of this order in Romani. E.g. Romani speakers from Romania show up to 70% of N-ADJ order.

Study 2: We designed an experiment to test short-term priming. A priming trial consisted of a sentence that the speaker read (in Romanian or in Romani) and a picture that the speaker described (in Romani). We used 18 experimental items and 20 fillers. 6 experimental trials tested a Romanian NDET-ADJ prime, and 6 a Romani DET-ADJ-N prime and 6 a Romani DET-N-DET-ADJ prime. 90 Romani-Romanian bilinguals from Romania participated in the study. They were contacted through three cultural associations (many thanks to all!) We used Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects regression to analyse the results.

We found significant cross-language priming effects: Speakers favour DET-N-ADJ in Romani immediately following a NDET-ADJ sentence read in Romanian. DET-ADJ-N is used more after having read a DET-ADJ-N order in Romani.

In a nutshell, cross-language priming plays a key role in the ongoing change from a dominant ADJ-N to a N-ADJ order that we observed in Romani spoken in Romania.

The widespread occurrence of nouns in one language with a determiner in the other, often referred to as mixed NPs, has generated much theorizing. Since both a formal syntactic account based on abstract features of the determiner and an account highlighting the notion of a Matrix language yield largely the same predictions, we marshal the variationist framework to assess empirically how the tenets of each play out in speaker choices. Our data derive from a massive corpus of spontaneous nominal mixes, produced by bilinguals in New Mexico, where bidirectional code-switching is the norm: Spanish strings are followed by English ones as often as the reverse within a sentence. Results show that bilinguals' choices are conditioned by NP status—mixed vs. unmixed (1a, 2a vs. 1b, 2b)— mixing type—limited-item vs. multi-word (1a,b vs. 2a,b) —and noun language—English vs. Spanish) (1,2 vs. 3). The community preference is for mixed NPs, independent of their theoretical felicity as dictated by determiner language properties. These NPs are mostly constituted of limited-item lone nouns, again regardless of noun language, such that the language of the determiner and any associated verb is perforce that of the local discourse. Finally, the overwhelming choice is for lone English nouns incorporated into Spanish, and hence for a Spanish determiner. We conclude that language of the determiner proceeds, not from abstract linguistic properties, but from adherence to strong bilingual speech community conventions.

(1) a. Mixed NP, nominal-limited item
tenían unos desks muy grandes [53:25-53:27]
‘they had some very big desks,’
b. Unmixed NP, nominal-limited item
si serían four lanes aquí [06, 2:31-2:33
‘if it would be four lanes here’

(2) a. Mixed NP, nominal-led multi-word code-switch
cruzando la road once in a while. [17, 37:00-37:03]
‘crossing the …’
b. Unmixed NP, nominal-led multi-word code-switch
porque ella quería that wood stove for sure. [04, 45:25-45:27]
‘because she wanted ...'

(3) a. Mixed NP, nominal-limited item, Spanish noun
from a pollito that we would raise. [04, 21:30-21:33]
‘... chick …’
b. Unmixed NP, nominal-limited item, Spanish noun
he’s el vaquero and, … [16, 38:38-38:30]
‘... the cowboy …'

a'. Mixed NP, nominal-led multi-word code-switch, Spanish noun
because the pelo se hace pa’ allá. [17, 39:44-39:46]
‘... hair goes one way’
b'. Unmixed NP, nominal-led multi-word code-switch, Spanish noun
and of course el vino que sirven. [28, 33:39-33:41]
‘... the wine that they serve’

International collaborative projects are bringing together researchers from different backgrounds to undertake ambitious, large-scale investigations. Gathered in research groups, they usually apply for calls launched by international funding institutions and seek for their projects to be financed. In exchange for the public expenditure, research groups are expected to regularly communicate the project results and widely share them with a heterogeneous, both specialized and non-specialized, audience. One enticing way to do this involves the digital realm and, more specifically, the use of websites. Thus, research project websites attest the development of the project and the productivity of the research group. Particular website sections are strategically devoted to the dissemination and exploitation of the project updates and novelties, among which news and events stands out.
In order to study how research groups emphasize the latest changes and advancements in their projects, the news and events sections in websites maintained by research groups financed by the European program Horizon2020 have been analysed. More concretely, newsworthiness has been approached from a pragmatic analytical perspective, with the aim of finding out the meta-functions used in the headlines of the news and events published by research groups. Headlines are regarded as the textual door to the news and events entries and, as such, are conceived to be appealing and explanatory to catch readers’ attention. The analysis presented in this paper focuses on the exploration of communicative, promotional and interactional purposes by associating these pragmatic macro-categories to a corpus of 1030 headlines from 24 news and events sections in research project websites.
Results display the frequency of the three pragmatic scopes and point out specific pragmatic strategies, as deployed in the headlines to disseminate project development. The range of discursive and lexico-grammatical devices employed to instantiate the pragmatic strategies also gives insights into the way researchers’ communicative purposes are construed when publishing project information online. Special emphasis is placed on noun and verbal phrases. Furthermore, key concepts such as visibility and identity are also discussed in the light of the quantitative and qualitative data retrieved from the corpus to understand how they are intrinsically connected with the notion of newsworthiness and overall researchers’ pragmatic intentions. In sum, this paper attempts to dig into international research groups’ current pragmatic and discursive practices in digital environments. The study of the digital genre of news and events will reveal the pragmatic strategies researchers employ in their attempt to communicate updates, publicize the research project and approach their potential public.

The idea is to give an overview of an on-going project for mapping linguistic variants used in Brazilian Portuguese in order to conceptualize verbal predication in passive voice proposition, adopting sociolinguistic and constructionist perspectives of multivariate usage-based language knowledge and considering these theoretical constructs: variation phenomenon; multivariate analysis; allostruction and (meta)construction representations.
Even in Sociolinguistics, that faces the problem of constraints evaluating the relation between a dependent variable and linguistic and extralinguistic variables based on statistical values, variation is not synonym of saying exactly the same. Alternating constructions are part of Construction Grammar generalizations, since, by analogy, users recognize/assign links of association between different constructions, part of their formal and functional attributes, so that they are conceptualized as functionally equivalent constructions that work in favor of (almost) the same meaning/function (output), although they are not identical. The (subtle) difference that the linguist captures comparing some of the usages of two or more constructions is not necessarily made by the users in all possible instances of the constructions. It can be, in use, obliterated and, then, the constructions may be represented in mind as conveying one intended message/fact.
The focus of this proposal of tweets is on the relation of similarity between different verbal constructions that make possible to organize passive propositions, according to results of Brazilian usage-based studies at Predicar Project, that deal with: the issue “What counts as alternating constructions in Brazilian Portuguese in order to profile passivization?” and three possible codifications, by means of auxiliary verb periphrasis (“quando alguém é demitido”/” when someone is fired”), support verb periphrasis (“quando alguém tem/sofre demissão”/“When someone suffers dismissal”) and synthetic structure (“quando se demite alguém”/”when we dismiss someone”).
The research project is based on multivariate analysis of data retrieved from written texts produced within the journalistic and the academic discourse domains and faces themes such as: the relation between variation and (regular/occasional) interchangeability; the criteria of determining which constructions are variants; the representation of the variation in Construction Grammar. Results indicate that the need to impersonalize the first participant of the state-of-affairs gives way to the association of constructions with: the pronoun SE; the auxiliary verbs ser, estar and ficar; and the support verbs ter, sofrer, levar and tomar.