Language, Literacy, and Health


Book Description

Language, Literacy, and Health: Discourse in Brazil’s National Health System analyzes language, literacy, and health as social practices in Brazil’s national health system, the Unified Health System (SUS), with a particular focus on the Family Health Strategy program. The SUS was established in the 1990s, offering free consultations, health promotion activities, and home visits by a professional team to the Brazilian population. Using research conducted in two different Brazilian regions, the Northeast and the Southeast, Izabel Magalhães and Kênia Lara da Silva discuss language and literacy as discourse—a very important dimension of health practice—and different uses of texts, including multimodal texts. The research, analysis, and the authors’ ethnographic approach bring to light some issues with SUS practices, and the authors suggest improvements. This book contributes to the debate about language and literacy in health practices, in which patients are partly responsible for keeping well.







Manual of Brazilian Portuguese Linguistics


Book Description

This manual is the first comprehensive account of Brazilian Portuguese linguistics written in English, offering not only linguists but also historians and social scientists new insights gained from the intensive research carried out over the last decades on the linguistic reality of this vast territory. In the 20 overview chapters, internationally renowned experts give detailed yet concise information on a wide range of language-internal as well as external synchronic and diachronic topics. Most of this information is the fruit of large-scale language documentation and description projects, such as the project on the linguistic norm of educated speakers (NURC), the project “Grammar of spoken Portuguese”, and the project “Towards a History of Brazilian Portuguese” (PHPB), among others. Further chapters of high contemporary interest and relevance include the study of linguistic policies and psycholinguistics. The manual offers theoretical insights of general interest, not least since many chapters present the linguistic data in the light of a combination of formal, functional, generative and sociolinguistic approaches. This rather unique feature of the volume is achieved by the double authorship of some of the relevant chapters, thus bringing together and synthesizing different perspectives.




Luso-Braz. Rev


Book Description




Wh-exclamatives, Imperatives and Wh-questions


Book Description

Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.




Automatic Discourse Analysis


Book Description

This volume offers the long-awaited overview of the work of the French philosopher and discourse analyst Michel Pecheux, who was the leading figure in French discourse analysis until his death in 1983. The volume presents the first English publication of the work of Pecheux and his coworkers on automatic discourse analysis. Outside France, French discourse analysis is almost exclusively known as the form of philosophical discourse presented by such authors as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The contemporary empirical forms of French discourse analysis have not reached a wider public to the degree they deserve. Through its combination of original texts, annotations, and several introductory texts, this volume facilitates an evaluation of both results and weaknesses of French discourse analysis in general and of the work of Michel Pecheux and his coworkers in particular.







Parenting and Couple Relationships Among LGBTQ+ People in Diverse Contexts


Book Description

This book analyzes how the increasing number of same-sex couples is changing the traditional concepts of family and parenthood, and how these changes affect the psychological studies of family, couple relationships and human development. The majority of chapters included in this contributed volume present results of research conducted with LGBTQ+ people in Brazil, a country where same-sex couples have been recognized by the national legislation since 2011, but is currently facing a conservative wave which threatens much of the victories gained by the LGBTQ+ movement in recent years. That’s why this book aims to provide both updated theoretical and methodological contributions as well as ethically and political engaged reflections to the field of psychological studies of LGBTQ+ parenting and couple relationships. Chapters in this volume analyze different aspects of LGBTQ+ parenting and couple relationships, such as changes in the concept of family; the role of the family of origin in the coming out process of young adults; risk and protective factors in couple relationships between lesbians and gay men; vulnerabilities experienced by trans couples during the COVID-19 pandemic; how lesbians, gays, trans and non-binaries are approaching parenting and raising their families; factors that shape the reproductive decisions of LGBTQ+ individuals; adoption and coparenting in families composed of gay and lesbian couples, among other topics. Parenting and Couple Relationships Among LGBTQ+ People in Diverse Contexts will be of interest to social, developmental and family psychologists and social workers researching and working with same-sex couples and families, and with the LGBTQ+ population in general.