Alcina Sousa | Universidade da Madeira (original) (raw)

Papers by Alcina Sousa

Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, 2021

The main goal of this paper is to examine how Lyme Regis, a coastal town in the South of England ... more The main goal of this paper is to examine how Lyme Regis, a coastal town in the South of England is portrayed in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, directed by Karel Reizs (1981), based on the novel by the same name by John Fowles, and how this dramatic and breathtaking depiction contributes to the marketing of the image of the location as a tourist destination (Beeton, 2005). The reason underlying the selection of the film, unlike other films researched by studies on film-induced tourism (e.g. Carvalho, Vieira & Sousa, 2013, 2014; Sousa & Carvalho, 2016; Sousa & Marinho, 2014), owes to the fact that it is a fictional story set in Lyme Regis focusing on character and plot rather than on location. Yet, as will be shown, the film succeeds in giving viewers an appealing image of the town through a combination of language and symbols, both verbal and non-verbal (visual), as well as affect combined with cognitive triggering (Buckland, 2003 [2000]). It is thus a second goal of this p...

Annals of Human Biology, 2004

Background: Skeletal maturity is used to evaluate biological maturity status. Information about t... more Background: Skeletal maturity is used to evaluate biological maturity status. Information about the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and skeletal maturity is limited in Portugal. Aims: The aim of this study is to document the skeletal maturity of youths in Madeira and to evaluate variation in maturity associated with SES. Subjects and methods: The study involved 507 subjects (256 boys and 251 girls) from the Madeira Growth Study, a mixed-longitudinal study of five cohorts (8, 10, 12, 14 and 16 years of age) followed at yearly intervals over 3 years (1996-1998). A total of 1493 observations were made. Skeletal age was estimated from radiographs of the hand and wrist using the Tanner-Whitehouse 2 method (TW2). Social class rankings were based on Graffar's (1956) method. Five social rankings were subsequently grouped into three SES categories: high, average and low. Results: Median for the radius, ulna and short finger bones (RUS scores) in the total sample of boys and girls increased curvilinearly across age whereas median for the 7 (without pisiform) carpal bones (Carpal scores) increased almost linearly. The 20-bone maturity scores demonstrated distinctive trends by gender: the medians for boys increased almost linearly while the medians for girls increased curvilinearly. SES differences were minimal. Only among children aged 10-11 years were high SES boys and girls advanced in skeletal maturity. Madeira adolescents were advanced in skeletal maturity compared with Belgian reference values. Conclusion: The data suggests population variation in TW2 estimates of skeletal maturation. Skeletal maturity was not related to SES in youths from Madeira.

Journal of Linguistic Intercultural Education, Jun 15, 2012

1 IntroductionGiven the scope of the current volume of this journal, the starting point of this p... more 1 IntroductionGiven the scope of the current volume of this journal, the starting point of this paper revolves around the following issues: Have computers redefined English literacy? To what extent has the digital era changed present-day Humanities undergraduates' reading preferences and habits in a Foreign Language (FL) context? Do FL undergraduates actually read texts in the digital medium, now that even more information on literary production is disseminated and retrieved in the electronic format? What sort of strategies should be devised to improve learning and research environments among Humanities undergraduates at university level, now that the ever-developing technological era with distance learning, Internet, new anthologies and digitised archives has gradually reshaped classroom / lecture settings, patterns of teaching, contexts of interaction and literacy practices. "The new knowledge being taught", acknowledged Diana Laurillard (also drawing on Noel Entwistle and Paul Ramsden) back in 1997 (p. 105), "depends greatly on students' individual experiences for they necessarily affect how they deal with academic knowledge". Despite today's adolescents being rightly described by Jacques Barzun (1991: 46) as "uncommonly intelligent and vigorous... worldly beyond their years, thanks perhaps to television", and I would add computer use, educational policies have reinforced paradoxical strands, for the last two decades: on the one hand a stress on innovation, on the other, "mechanical" instruction and assessment of knowledge about facts (Naciscione, 2001). Many researchers claim that this is supposedly to be simply leading to immediate achievement, social success and accomplishment.2 Relevance and review of the literatureConcerning the review of literature section, a liminal discussion of new forms of virtual identities might bear some support, for example, in Bearne and Kress's grounding, right at the turn of the century (2001: 89)1, of a new relationship between the word, the image and non-visual stimuli as complementary rather than simply overlapping interpretations, which provide new ways of thinking beyond the theoretical and historical perspectives on the text. Both Internet Culture (Porter, 1996) and The Digital Classroom (Gordon, 2000) extend the realm of discussion into the pedagogical context by means of a balanced theoretical and practical analysis in as much as, in the arts, this complementary differentiation, to fall upon Suhor's claim2 (1984: 23),has diminished in favor of holistic, multimedia expression. Television and film, of course, are inherently multimedia; but the traditional arts have moved toward combinations of genre and the blurring of distinctions between the work, the performer, and the audience. Participatory drama, concrete poetry, aleatory music, and mobile sculptures are instances of totalistic approaches to artistic production and response.In fact, the industrial, scientific and technological developments seem to have been the cause for continuous change in the educational sphere, regarded by some as progress whilst by fierce opponents as a drawback, entailing a first focus on knowledge about facts and the learning of the basic R's (that is reading, writing and arithmetic) so as to meet the needs of an increasingly less literate working class. For the common citizen the idea of literacy has been connected with schooling, and the literary representation has long raised the issue. Simultaneously, moves towards interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary clines have been suggested because English studies should be "reshaped not only by the literary and cultural developments but also by English as the international language-code of business and technological advancement" (Weiss, 1999: 54). "The foremost challenge facing English studies today", adds Weiss, "is the reconception of its identity within the university in such a way that it not only responds to economic globalization and technological change but also provides a new vision of the importance of interpretive, language and communication skills in the 21st century". …

Topics in Linguistics, Sep 1, 2012

Analysing discourse as a social practice and the rhetoric of regional plans entails a focus on th... more Analysing discourse as a social practice and the rhetoric of regional plans entails a focus on the features of context, such as identities of participants, the social structures, and the professional relationships urban planning is likely to maintain or change. This paper aims at discussing recurrent trends in regional land-use planning concerning development versus conservation in the 1990s in the Portuguese context. Two regional plans, whose date of approval shows a ten-year span, are compared within a cross-disciplinary framework with two tourism plans. Two major fields, namely linguistics (i.e. corpus linguistics and discourse analysis) and territory planning, highlight how language in regulations is used, based on a quantitative empirical study. The main findings, drawing both on exploratory data and methods from computational linguistics, point towards increasing levels of subjectivity. The close scrutiny of linguistic and discursive choices, with a focus on the interaction of segmental, supra-segmental and textual levels, also highlights the multimodal nature of the regulations of these two regional land plans. Concurrently, underlying discourses towards development rather than conservation come to the fore in both plans

Journal of Linguistic Intercultural Education, Jun 15, 2019

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Journal of Linguistic Intercultural Education, Dec 15, 2021

Humour is often used for aesthetic, pedagogical and sociocultural purposes in satire, either divi... more Humour is often used for aesthetic, pedagogical and sociocultural purposes in satire, either dividing and/or uniting interlocutors, and simultaneously uncovering power relations, i.e., injustice and inequality (Sousa 2009a-c; Sousa, Bazenga, & Antunes 2009). Further studies are claimed (Duch 2014) to be still undertaken about the way humour is conveyed in (trans)cultural / translingual contexts as the ones in insular settings like the archipelago of Madeira (Portugal). Hence, it is relevant to see whether humour strategies evidenced in a satirical newspaper; Re-nhau-nhau (a local publication issued in Madeira throughout the 20th century), could entail a way of raising citizens’ consciousness of the sort of power relations in cosmopolitan contexts (following the notions by Norrick, & Chiaro 2009, Dovchin, & Canagarajah 2019). Locals / residents in Madeira have been reported to be both under the sovereign influence of Portugal (as a Portuguese region), and the British socio-cultural, economic, as well as linguistic influence, due to the century-long (trans)cultural contact (Sousa 2017). Thus, this paper of empirical and exploratory kind intends to account for the way power relations are addressed in humour discursive practices, selected from a satirical newspaper issued in Madeira during dictatorship in Portugal. Do caricaturists only portray unfair situations via diverse humorous strategies to make readers aware of injustice to be overturn, in part, via the implementation of fairer government measures in the following decade? A pragmalinguistic approach underpins the analysis of twenty-two caricatures, selected from Re-nhau-nhau (between 1934 and 1948), in the line of research suggested by Kecskes, & Romero-Trillo (2013). A set of British public figures, like Henry Hinton and Graham Blandy, frequently displayed in this satirical paper, have led the selection criterion of the corpus to be studied, given their meaning potential as multimodal discursive practices. This study entails the study of coherence, irony (i.e., echoic irony in Attardo’s stance, 2000), speech acts (Austin 1962; Searle 1996) and face-threatening acts (Brown, & Levinson 1987) as mechanisms to achieve humour and social intervention goals in the corpus selected for this study. Research findings point to the relevance of pragmalinguistic strategies to disambiguate humour strategies as well as the underlying aesthetic and pedagogical effect of caricatures in Re-nhau-nhau. Power and agency are overturned and defamiliarized in the dialogic process of meaning making always with a humorous undertone, sometimes making use of conceptual metaphors and translanguaging. Considering the principle of ridendo castigat mores, this satirical paper points to some discrepancy concerning the way the sets of British residents (Mr Hinton and Mr Blandy) are represented, being Henry Hinton the most openly criticized figure at the time.

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, Dec 1, 2020

This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in to... more This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in tourism and leisure interdiscursive domains as displayed in course books on professional communication in English (commonly pointing to ESP). These supposedly replicate interaction in real life settings. Therefore, it is relevant to uncover the ways authentic interactions can be interpreted in the pedagogical setting of workplace conversation from a discursive and pragmatic perspective. More specifically, this empirical and exploratory study discusses ways of improving rapport management skills in interpersonal and intercultural communication, in general, and in professional interaction, in particular, in a selection of excerpts on greeting / asking for info exchanges. The study uncovers participants’ possible co-constructions of civility and politeness strategies in naturally occurring classroom discourse supported by course materials in English for glocal communication across segments in the tourism domain as object of this study.

Journal of Linguistic Intercultural Education, Jun 30, 2021

Global leaders have addressed the COVID-19 pandemic in various ways and registers well beyond the... more Global leaders have addressed the COVID-19 pandemic in various ways and registers well beyond the scientific-technical genre, some of which have been unexpectedly undermined by a war-like undertone broadcast by both the media and social networks (cf. conceptual metaphor as discussed, for example, by Lakoff, & Johnson 1980, and Koller 2011). According to Hartmann-Mahmud (2002), metaphors are often exploited to manipulate emotion and to justify courses of action related, in this case, to a pandemic scenario, thereby potentially fostering the labelling of the virus with lexemes such as an enemy, invisible or hidden, or even as a prompter for war, hatred, prejudice and racism. Particularly interesting for this research paper is the study in progress of the occurrence of metaphors, associated with the pandemic, retrieved from the Twitter of Donald Trump (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump), especially given his reported high engagement with interlocutors in social media (Walther 1992, Crystal 2006, Greengard 2009, Murthy 2013, Baym 2015, Burgess, & Baym 2020). The corpora comprise all original tweets disseminated by Trump in two periods: the first from September 2019 to January 2020; and the latter from February to June 2020. Drawing on corpus linguistics and a discourse-based approach (Baker 2006), it is possible to account for metaphors associated with the lemma COVID in Trump’s Twitter. Research findings indicate 123 occurrences of the lemma virus closely associated with the following lexical items: corona, Covid, China, Chinese, hidden enemy, invisible enemy and war. This study analyses conceptual metaphors in Trump’s communicative strategies throughout the early and mid-stages of the pandemic. Hence, it reflects upon the impact of figurative language in the social construction of meaning, particularly that of leaders’ interactions with citizens and internet followers in real world interactions via social media, which borrows increasingly from online exchanges (Sousa, & Ivanova 2012) more than any other media (for instance international press).

Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education

Desde el planteamiento del enfoque interactivo de lectura y de la concreción de facetas de metaco... more Desde el planteamiento del enfoque interactivo de lectura y de la concreción de facetas de metacognición lectora, la formulación de expectativas se muestra como una clave esencial para guiar al lector en el avance del texto. Estimular la formulación de las expectativas de anticipación, iniciales y genéricas, resulta un procedimiento de motivación, que a su vez se desarrolla a través de distintas estrategias. Entre éstas, los reconocimientos de distintos tipos de referentes-temáticos, discursivos, literarios, intertextuales-generan una incipiente interacción con las posibles aportaciones del lector, desde su competencia lecto-literaria, sus experiencias lectoras y su intertexto lector. Esta ponencia presenta la motivación desde la activación de referentes del lector y recoge el análisis de distintos ejemplos y propuestas para estimular su implicación, a partir de claves de reconocimiento y de relación intertextual.

Objectives | This paper aims at discussing recurrent trends in tourism planning derived from regi... more Objectives | This paper aims at discussing recurrent trends in tourism planning derived from regional land-use planning and concerning sustainable development versus the tourism growth context. It also aims at providing a diachronic comparison between legal texts, on the one hand regional plans, and on the other tourism plans, which is an issue of utmost relevance for the redesign of the forthcoming regulations in the new regional plans for Portugal. Methodology | Following a previous analysis of two regional plans, the one for the Algarve region (PROTAL) and the one for the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon (PROTAML), two tourism plans, the one for Madeira (POTMADEIRA) and the one for Douro (PDTVD), are compared within a cross-disciplinary framework. This entails, among other domains, territory planning / tourism plans and linguistics, such as discourse analysis, semantics and syntax, not to mention the use of more common techniques in computational linguistics as the ones involving corpusdriven approaches (Baker, 2006). The selection of the corpus of legal texts follows several external criteria (Sinclair, 2004), namely: i. broader territorial scope, overlooking specificities unlikely to be compared; ii. production by multidisciplinary teams, including legal experts, granting (Alves Correia, 1993) higher quality standards to the rules issued; iii. limited production by a few public-administration agencies, which allows for a better control of variables, like urban descriptors, as well as linguistic and discursive choices, constrained by "normativities" (Blommaert, 2005 in Baker, 2006) shared in complementary discourse communities of territory and tourism planning. As for the external criteria, these derive from the examination of the communicative function of regulations, whereas the internal criteria reflect details of the language of the texts. The first part of this paper focuses on a selection of linguistic and discursive choices, via computer analysis of, notably, lexical modals, modal verbs, adjectives and relevant structures which are singled out given their unexpected occurrence in legal texts of this type. Some considerations on methodological aspects are briefly made in the second section. This is followed by the presentation of case studies coupled with a discussion of exploratory data. Main results and contributions | Main findings, drawing both on exploratory data and methods from computational linguistics, point towards increasing levels of subjectivity in regional planning; yet the same cannot be stated in the tourism domain. Two major fields, namely linguistics (i.e., corpus linguistics and discourse analysis) and tourism planning within a territorial approach, flash out, on more quantitative empirical methods, how language in regulations is used. More than a

Os verbos operativos na melhoria cognitiva e na aprendizagem dos alunos: dossiê de atividades, Oct 1, 2017

The Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 2009

Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 2009