Revista de Estudos da Linguagem

31-50

Authors: Carlos Alexandre Gonçalves

Left Deslocation (LD) and Focus (F) are phenomena characterized for putting in relief a constituent of the oral text. In other words, they are focusing strategies frequently used in Brazilian Portuguese (BP).For this reason, I intend to confront them in this paper, in order to check (a) their limits and (b) their structural domains. Thus, my purpose is to answer the following questions: (i) Are these phenomena independent, or do they exert mutual influence in at least some ways? (ii) Is there an obligated superposing between them? (iii) if not, what are the actuation domains (syntactic and/or phonological) of LD and F? (iv) What are the prosodic features of LD and F constituents? (v) What kinds of discursive-pragmatic phenomena motivate LD and F? My main aim is to show that LD shouldn’t be analized as a focus marker in BP, because Focus must be faced as a prosodic category that require a Contrastive Intonation.

59-89

Authors: Elisa Battisti

The acceptance of the hypothesis of a /vN/ sequence as the basis of both nasal vowels and diphthongs, and the investigation of the nature of the nasal consonant in syllable coda, led us to relate subspecification of the nasal segment to the triggering of nasalization through the principles of Prosodic Licensing (Itô 1986,1989) and Autosegmental Licensing (Goldsmith 1990). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993) conceives these principles as restrictions. The model predicts that the interaction of restrictions in a hierarchy determines the choice of the optimal form from a group of candidates generated by the grammar of a language for a given input. The conflict between Licence(place) and HavePlace chooses the homorganic NC sequence as one of the three possible optimal forms for the /vN/ sequence in word-internal position. In word-final position, the same two restrictions play a role in nasal glide formation from / oN/. The outcoming of a dissimilated peak-vowel is forced by MaxDist.

107-124

Authors: Márcia Barreto Berg

The aim of this paper is to identify the categorial nature of preposition, from the perpective of Chomsky’s Generative Grammar (1981/1995). The preposition has been described as a lexical, uniform category, defined by the features [ N, V]. This classification is not consensual, however. We therefore made a survey of the proprieties that distinguish the lexical from the functional, applied the properties to the data of Brazilian Portuguese and came to conclusion that prepositions belong to the functional category.

135-142

Authors: Ana Maria Chiarini

Resenha: Appropriate methodology and social context– Adrian Holliday