Revista de Estudos da Linguagem

31-70

Authors: Luiz Antônio Marcuschi

This essay analyzes the metaphor as a specific way of knowing theworld and treats it as a chapter of epistemology rather than ofSemantics. It reviews concepts already developed by Aristotle andQuintiliano, among others, and refuses to accept metaphor as thetransposition of sense or the comparison of two referential domains.It suggests a new view based on the work of Max Black for whomlanguage is seen more as an interactive activity than a system ofsigns. In sum, from a genetic point of view, it defends the thesisthat the metaphor is an a priori synthesis: it is based on the intuitivecreative capacity and not on logical or analytic thought.

91-108

Authors: Rodolfo Ilari

The boundaries between Semantics and Pragmatics still deserve to beinvestigated, since they remain unclear for many linguists, and since theword “pragmatics” has quite often been used among Brazilian linguists inan unscientific, rhetorical way, to enhance the importance of some approachesto meaning and interpretation.This paper claims that a theoretically sound boundary can be drawnbetween semantical and pragmatical approaches if we look at the waythey deliver interpretations. Semantic interpretations are typically the resultof some kind of calculus, whereas pragmatic interpretations are typicallythe result of some working out where no calculus intervenes, rather ahighly specific solution is sought in order to integrate some unexpectedfact into a coherent story. Thus defined, Semantics and Pragmatics can bereferred to as deduction and abduction, respectively.In the light of the distinction just described, I revisit some of the phenomenathat were pointed out in the last decades as best examples of the pragmaticfunctioning of natural language. I argue that presupposition, deixis andspeech acts, highly predictable from lexicon and grammar, are semanticalin nature; on the contrary, implicature, since it depends on abductivethinking and it is not predictable from linguistic form, is described as apragmatic phenomenon par excellence.

163-192

Authors: Maria da Graça Costa Val; Vanessa Cardoso Guimarães

This article is a reworking of two moments of a research project entitled “Between orality and writing”, a study of the genesis of written discourse in children who are learning how to write: the firstmoment is concerned with narrative, the second with letter writing.In both these moments, language is seen as a system organized in and for social interaction, composed of the grammatical,semantic and discursive sub-systems, and human cognition is interpreted as a socially mediated process of subjective construction. We analyze the enunciative activity of children, obtaining evidence of their linguistic skill and their progress in the construction of the discursive styles being studied.