Residency period: August 1, 2016 to July 31, 2017
IEAT resident, Márcia Cançado is a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, holds a PhD in Linguistics from the State University of Campinas (1995), did her first post-doctorate at the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University (USA, 2001/2002) and a second post-doctorate at the Department of Linguistics at the University of São Paulo (USP, 2009/2010). She works in the field of Linguistics, with emphasis on the interface Semantic Lexical / Syntax and Description of Brazilian Portuguese. She is the author of the books “Manual de Semantica”, “Catálogo de Verbos do Português Brasileiro” (co-authored by Godoy, L .; Amaral, L.), and “Introdução à Semantica Lexical; thematic roles, lexical aspect and predicate decomposition” (co-authorship Amaral, L.). In his Lattes curriculum, the most frequent terms in the context of scientific production are: Brazilian Portuguese Verb Classes, Decomposition into Primitive Predicates, Argument Structure, Verbal Alternations, Thematic Roles, Thematic Hierarchy, Lexical Aspect, among others.
LINGUISTICS, COMPUTING AND EDUCATION – APPROACHES TO A CATALOG OF BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE VERBS
The project aims to relate and give continuity to three disciplinary research fronts in the areas of Theoretical and Descriptive Linguistics, Education and Informatics. The results obtained in the theoretical part of the analysis will serve as subsidies and will be applied in the development of the other two projects. The projects will be developed based on the research program entitled “Description and semantic representation of the Brazilian Portuguese verbal lexicon”, which has been developed by the author, advisees and collaborators (former advisees and professors external to UFMG) since 1995. This program has had as its main result, so far, the work entitled “Catálogo de Verbos do Português Brasileiro – verbal classification according to the decomposition of predicates. Volume I: Verbs of Change”. This work, co-authored with Luisa Godoy (UFVJM) and Luana Amaral (UFMG), was published in 2013, by Editora UFMG, and presents a broad and detailed description and analysis of the verbal lexicon of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and also a broad description of the grammar of our language. This work contains a list of BP verbs (862 verbs), divided into certain classes, according to syntactic and semantic properties, and sentences related to these properties (5500 sentences), in addition to an introductory part that explains the theoretical approach used in the treatment of these data. The three projects to be developed at the IEAT, which we can understand as subprojects of a broader project, will be based on the results of this extensive research work.
The first subproject, of a theoretical and descriptive nature, will continue the first catalog of verbs and proposes to continue in the broad and exhaustive investigation into the verbal lexicon of BP, focusing, in this second part, on the verbs known as activity verbs. Researchers and students from UFMG are involved in this subproject.
The second subproject, related to the area of information technology, deals with the construction of a computerized database based on the first volume of the “Catálogo de Verbos do Português Brasileiro” (Cançado et al., 2013). Such a database will allow users to carry out simple and complex queries and developers to continuously perform updates and corrections. Researchers and those interested in lexical and grammatical phenomena will be able to easily verify the existence or not of certain classes, the possibility or not of the co-occurrence of certain properties, identifying eventual gaps that may influence decisions of a theoretical nature, in addition to consulting examples in which verbs in question are used. This subproject involves researchers and students from the Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Letters at UFMG.
The third subproject, related to the area of Education, aims to develop a method and, consequently, didactic material for teaching Portuguese as a Foreign or Additional Language (PLE/PLA), focusing on the level of the linguistic structure, adopting for this the data and the analyzes found in the “Catálogo de Verbos do Português Brasileiro”. An important justification for the present project is the lack of literature that resides not exclusively in PLE/PLA books, but in foreign language textbooks, in general. This is the absence of a systematic teaching method known as “argument structure”. Researchers and students from UFMG and UFVJM are involved in this subproject.
The project foresees as results: a) the final elaboration of the “Catálogo de verbos do BP. Volume II: Activity Verbs” in publication format; b) the availability of the database on the WEB, already updated with new data from the second catalogue; c) the presentation of a pilot plan for a PLE/PLA method, available for testing in Portuguese for Foreigners classes.