The third and final issue of Alfa in 2016 brings a number of representative works of the innovative and questioning research that has marked the best of recent developments in Linguistics, in Brazil.
The first article, Mulico and Tilio’s, historicizes the course of formation and transformation of an area of research both consolidated and expanding in language studies - Applied Linguistics. They recover the initial approaches - with theoretical and experimental concerns, and interest in teaching / learning languages, and then highlight the emergence of what is called today Contemporary Applied Linguistics. Featuring this theoretical proposal as critical, transgressive and indisciplinable, hybrid and transient, the authors argue that it can be designed as a Complex Adaptive System, a concept affiliated to the Complexity Theory.
Angelo and Menegassi, still under the “spirit” of Applied Linguistics, elaborate a reflection based on an empirical study on the theme of written production in the teaching practice. Their study includes participant observation and collaborative interventions with a teacher in a specific context - the production of textual genre response at the Supporting Room for Portuguese Learning (SAALP). The analysis indicates the need for monitoring and guidance of professionals, in an effective process of continuing education. The study reinforces the perception of how necessary it is to build a bridge between the knowledge produced in academia and the teaching practice. It shows that, if the task is urgent, it is also feasible.
Our third article - Butturi Junior’s - also focuses on writing, but thinking about the notion of authorship and the creation process, taking the perspective of the place and role of the subject: the limits of (un) subjectivity in writing. The objective is to analyze these issues from Foucault’s perspective, or more precisely, to verify to what extent and how they can be analyzed from that perspective.
Writing is still the place of reflection in the fourth article of this issue, where Calil analyzes the meaning of words, as it is built in the writing process of a dyad of newly literate students. Although the writing is the anchor locus, the author shows that it is in the context of enunciation that the senses are formed by the multi-modal exchanges between the participants (which go far beyond verbal). The analysis of a corpus of filmic records, according to the approach of Textual Genetics, unveils the textual creation process, with all its traces (constructions, reconstructions, “oral erasures”) and enunciator language skills that the text - final product – does not allow to be perceived.
The role of coenunciation, so present in Calil’s article, is also fundamental for the seizure of the process of assembly of the referential chain of a text, a central issue of Neves e Souza’s article. The authors investigate the way of creating and maintaining such chains in narrative sequences present in a set of Brazilian novels, showing that the process goes through the non-random selection of phoric elements. The study concludes that the choice of these elements serves precise functions in the construction of each text and therefore they cannot be reduced to a class with pre-defined values and roles.
The last article of this number, Viaro and Bizzocchi’s, brings to light an innovative proposal for research in etymology, related to the preparation of the project Portuguese Etymological Dictionary (Delpo), developed by NEHiLP-USP. Although having emerged from a specific project, the theoretical and methodological contributions presented here go far beyond it, representing a very important input into this area of linguistics and into other areas that benefit from it. It is worth remembering that the etymological studies are the basis for understanding many linguistic processes, particularly historical ones.
Our issue ends with two reviews, a type of text not always present in the pages of Alfa, but always welcome, for their important role in making known recent and relevant works. Both analyze works of the same area - Discourse, addressed in each work from a different theoretical perspective.
Marchezan evaluates and comments on Dialogism: theory and(in) practice, a set of studies from a Bakhtinian orientation, organized by Brait and Magalhães. Souza analyzes Language and Discourse: modes of organization, which organically combines a set of Patrick Charaudeau texts, in an unprecedented publication in Portuguese of the work of this important researcher who proposed the Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse Analysis.
We hope that this set of instigating studies are a pleasant source of new knowledge for our readers.
Rosane de Andrade Berlinck
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Sep-Dec 2016
