Lisbon Summer School in Linguistics 2020

Research Seminar in Linguistics

Lisbon, 6-10 July 2020

Videoconference

Area 1: Formal and Experimental Linguistics

Language awareness and reading and writing skills
Joana Batalha

Abstract
In this session, two research projects in educational linguistics will be presented, both focusing on relations between language awareness and reading and writing skills in L1 Portuguese. The first project (Relations between Explicit Knowledge of Language and Reading: Comprehension of Referential Dependencies in Basic Education) was concluded in 2018 and consisted of a pre/posttest study that aimed at (i) pre-assessing 91 students’ ability to comprehend referential dependencies in reading tasks at different stages (grades 4, 6 and 8), (ii) proposing a teaching intervention to develop language awareness about referential dependencies and, more specifically, to develop strategies to identify antecedents of pronouns (grade 4) and (iii) assessing the effects of the teaching intervention on the ability to comprehend referential dependencies (grade 4).
The second project – PIPALE (Preventive Intervention Project for the Learning of Reading and Writing) – is an ongoing project involving 594 children (aged 5 to 7) with the following general aims: (i) assessing language awareness (at phonological and syntactic levels) of pre-readers and beginning readers and (ii) supporting pre-school and primary schools teachers in a teaching intervention that promotes the development of language awareness in relation to reading and writing skills.

The syntax-discourse interface: A problem area in L2 acquisition and in L2 teaching?
Joana Teixeira

Abstract
This talk will address three questions which have been the focus of much debate in the field of second language (L2) acquisition over the past two decades: (i) Are phenomena involving a grammar-external interface like the syntax-discourse interface an area of permanent divergence in L2 acquisition? (ii) Are core syntactic phenomena and phenomena involving grammar-internal interfaces easier for all L2 learners than phenomena involving the syntax-discourse interface? (iii) Can explicit grammar teaching promote the acquisition of phenomena that are hard at near-native and / or advanced stages? These questions will be discussed on the basis of the results of a series of studies conducted by Teixeira (2018, 2019) on the acquisition and teaching of subject-verb inversion in L2 English.

On parsing syntactic ambiguities: the case of Relative Clauses and Pseudo Relatives
Miriam Aguilar

Abstract
The debate over whether universal parsing mechanisms are necessary to explain sentence comprehension is clearly a fundamental one for psycholinguistics. The work I will present in this seminar focuses on the relation between syntactic ambiguity and locality. Locality is a principle of optimality that guides parsing decisions to guarantee efficient and economical structure building. One exception that has captured much attention in the psycholinguistics literature is the case of non-local preferences in Relative Clause (RC) attachment with two antecedents (e.g. Someone shot the servant of the actress that was on the balcony) reported in Spanish by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988), and extended to other languages thereafter. This finding poses a problem to the universality of parsing principles. A recent proposal (PR-first Hypothesis, Grillo & Costa, 2014) suggests that previous research neglected the availability of Pseudo Relatives (PRs), which has been mistakenly accounted as RCs given their superficial similarity. However, the structural and interpretative properties of PRs make them easier to parse, which can account for the observed non-local attachment found in a subset of languages. I will present different studies testing the predictions of this hypothesis in Spanish using offline and online eye-tracking techniques, while also looking at the interaction with aspectual properties of the embedded predicate, and the generalization of effects to the prediction/generation domain.

Area 2: Terminology and Lexicology

EndoTerm: a terminological approach to knowledge organization within the biomedical domain
Sara Carvalho

Abstract
This seminar aims to describe a terminological approach to knowledge organization by resorting to the EndoTerm project as a case study. This knowledge-based terminological resource, anchored in the synergies between Terminology and ontologies, focuses on endometriosis and seeks to contribute to a more effective way of organizing and sharing the current knowledge regarding this particular subject field, either between human or machine users.
After exploring EndoTerm’s theoretical and methodological principles, anchored in the synergies between Terminology – with its double-dimensional nature – and ontologies, EndoTerm’s core structure will be presented, namely the two modules that function in an autonomous, yet interrelated, way: [1] a conceptual module, supported by existing biomedical terminological resources, such as SNOMED CT or the Unified Medical Language System, and which constitutes the basis of a formal ontology; and [2] the linguistic module, whose goal is to enrich the knowledge base with terms, natural language definitions and other relevant linguistic information, and which results from the analysis of the EndoCorpus, a monolingual (English), specialized corpus related to endometriosis, specifically built within the scope of this project.

Terminology and ontologies in Islamic pottery studies: from knowledge to texts
Bruno Almeida

Abstract
This session will focus on the relationship between terminology and applied ontology, both understood as interdisciplinary domains at the crossroads of language and knowledge. The session will be based on work carried out for the development of a knowledge-based terminological resource on Islamic pottery artefacts, which was motivated by the perceived lack of denominative harmonisation in the domain, both in Portugal and in Spain. This work consisted essentially on: (i) the development of OntoAndalus, an ontology of Islamic artefacts and other relevant concepts in archaeological pottery studies, and (ii) the semi-automatic extraction and modelling of Portuguese and Spanish terms.

Area 3: Grammar & Text

Multimodalidade e padrão discursivo em diferentes géneros de texto
Audria Leal & Rute Rosa

Resumo
Inscrevendo-se no âmbito da Linguística do Texto e do Discurso, o seminário tem como objetivo descrever algumas regularidades do funcionamento de textos de diferentes géneros. A sessão organizar-se-á em três partes: começaremos por apresentar o quadro teórico e metodológico do Interacionismo Sociodiscursivo; na segunda parte, recorreremos aos modelos da Semiótica Social e da Semiótica Sociointeracional, aplicando-os na análise de textos do género cartoon e reportagem; a terceira parte, será dedicada à apresentação do padrão discursivo como instrumento de análise de textos e de caracterização diferencial de géneros textuais, observando-se os fatores que intervêm nas regularidades observadas nos textos (singularidade) e nos géneros (genericidade).

Discourse markers in text organization of the genre stand-up comedy in Portugal and in the United States
Milana Morozova

Abstract
In this session, conversational discourse markers (e.g. well, you know, bem, quer dizer) are seen as a genre parameter of stand-up comedy, i.e. a characteristic trait that constitutes the genre’s identity. This assumption is based on the fact that stand-up comedy is typically described as a conversational form of art and, therefore, similar to any interactive spoken practice, it is rich in discourse markers. The research to be presented explores the frequency, the functions, the distribution, the position and the role of the selected range of conversational discourse markers in text organization of the genre stand-up comedy. The results showed that there are three main tendencies regarding the implementation of this genre parameter in concrete texts (in American English and European Portuguese). These tendencies will be discussed in more detail along the session.

Distancing strategies in grammar and text: ways of saying without compromising
Teresa Oliveira

Abstract
This course will focus on the linguistic marking of distance, in particular the ways in which the enunciators code, in their speech, their distancing from the propositional content of their utterances. The underlying study is primarily centered on various journalistic text genres, and is based on corpus research and analysis at the interface between different linguistic levels (semantics, syntax, lexicon, discourse). Our approach privileges a transcategorial analysis aiming to clarify how different linguistic categories (modality, evidentiality, tense and aspect) interact in the construction of distancing.

10 modules will be offered, including an introductory and a discussion module.

Check the Program (PDF) and the Abstracts (PDF).

Participation is free of charge, but registration is mandatory by filling out the form available here until July 3rd.