Inresearch on African varieties of Portuguese, especially Angolan and MozambicanPortuguese, it is often referred that Goal arguments of verbs of movement showa tendency to be headed by locative preposition em ‘in’, contrastingwith the use of a ‘to’and para ‘to, toward’ in EuropeanPortuguese. Language contact is generally considered theprimary factor with respect to the use of the noncanonical pattern. Usingspoken corpora of the urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican and SantomeanPortuguese, this paper develops a case-study of Goal arguments that occur with twofrequently used verbs of inherently directed motion, ir ‘to go’ and chegar‘to arrive’, to assess the contact-induced hypothesis and to explore alternative,semantic-based hypotheses. Overall, a cross-comparison of the varieties atstake and their main contact languages shows that the role of language contactis limited at best. A semantic analysis of em, on the other hand, showspromising results, since the occurrence of this preposition is favored by NPsthat denote an entity with well-defined boundaries and is sensitive to thelexical semantics of the verbs, i.e., whether the verb describes a durative ornon-durative change of place, and to the type of eventuality described by thepredication.

In this paper, we put forward a semantic analysis of constructions of prepositional phrases introduced by the preposition para with a locative meaning combined with the verbs ser, estar and ficar. In this proposal, we characterise these constructions regarding the properties individual-level/ stage-level, modal reading, and vagueness of the location, as well as restrictions imposed on the subject related to some lexical semantic features, in particular [movable] and [animated] features. Additionally, we contrast these constructions to the ones introduced by the preposition em (typically locative), revealing to what extent they differ from each other.

The main objective of this paper is to study the semantics of verbs of inherently directed motion (Levin, 1993) ir (‘go’) and vir (‘come’) combined with prepositional phrases with the thematic role of Goal, headed by the prepositions para (‘to) and até (‘to’) in European Portuguese. The data from our news-based-corpus reveals that both prepositions can occur with motion verbs without any apparent restrictions and introduce complements of the verbs ir and vir, although they carry slightly different interpretations: with para, there is a reading that the entity that undergoes movement remains longer in destination than with até. When these prepositions occur within predications that describe non-physical movement, the restrictions increase. The contribution of these prepositions to the determination of the aspectual profile of predications that represent events of movement, namely telicity, poses some theoretical problems, which will also be addressed. This paper puts forward some hypotheses of explanation of the data to be developed in future work.

This paper describes two different approaches to sentiment analysis. The first is a form of symbolic approach that exploits a sentiment lexicon together with a set of shifter patterns and rules. The sentiment lexicon includes single words (unigrams) and is developed automatically by exploiting labeled examples. The shifter patterns include intensification, attenuation/downtoning and inversion/reversal and are developed manually. The second approach exploits a deep neural network, which uses a pre-trained language model. Both approaches were applied to texts on economics and finance domains from newspapers in European Portuguese. We show that the symbolic approach achieves virtually the same performance as the deep neural network. In addition, the symbolic approach provides understandable explanations, and the acquired knowledge can be communicated to others. We release the shifter patterns to motivate future research in this direction.

The main objective of this paper is to highlight the relevance of teaching, and evaluating, some semantic contents to students of elementary and secondary schools. We put forward a proposal which includes some semantic concepts that are not taught at all or are taught, but in a shallow manner. From these, we select three to illustrate some of their features whose study may be important not only to increase students awareness of their language, but also to develop students’ skills in areas such as reading and writing.