Museum educators play a key role in explaining science in a museum. Verbal language is primarily used to communicate scientific concepts, but the way language shapes the explanations provided has not been investigated. This qualitative study focuses on the explanations about light provided by three museum educators to eighth grade students (13-14 years old), during unstructured visits to a science museum. The visits were audio-recorded and field notes were taken. The museum educators' language was analyzed at a microlevel, through the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics and Conceptual Metaphor theory.The results of this analysis coupled with a multidimensional framework for analyzing explanations allowed an understanding on what is explained and how it is explained in the museum by museum educators. Findings show that explanations were descriptive and causal, structured by the use of hybrid lexicon and by conceptual metaphors, whose quality depends on the structural similarity between domains.Furthermore, the explanations based on geometric optics were qualitative and with low level of precision, complexity, and abstractness.

Existentials have been associated with the functions of asserting existence of an entity, setting a scene, presentation of new discourse entities, as well as listing. They are structures whose meaning is connected to discourse. Although the construction has been widely studied, some of the functions it performs, such as the impersonalising function have remained largely unexplored. This paper takes impersonalisation as a functional concept, in the sense of agent removal from a scene, shows how existentials in European Portuguese are also impersonal constructions, and describes them within the framework of construction grammar.

Portuguese became one of the official languages of independent East Timor after ca. 25 years of Indonesian rule; this prevented the partial restructuring of an East Timorese variety of Portuguese in a similar way to that undergone by other Portuguese varieties (e.g., Mozambican, Angolan and Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese). We will discuss the idiosyncratic use of SE constructions in the speech of literate Portuguese-speaking East Timorese immigrants in Portugal, who will go back to East Timor and will be likely to lead language change. Given this particular link between East Timor and its diasporas, linguistic innovations in the immigration context can shed light on the initial stages of a future partially-restructured East Timorese Portuguese variety. SE constructions are highly polysemous and marked and the data show that innovative patterns are emerging, comprising deletion and generalization of the clitic as well as creative uses of these constructions, mainly observed in impersonal and spontaneous situation types. These innovative patterns can be attributed to L2 acquisition and to the interference of Tetum Dili.

tuguese se constructions, posited in the transitive continuum, have a constructional counterpart in which the clitic is absent. The null clitic construction, observed in all the seconstructions (i.e. reflexive, reciprocal, middle, anticausative, passive and impersonal) is more frequently used in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) than in European Portuguese (EP). The phenomenon has largely been studied from a morphosyntatic lens or as a result of an ongoing deletion of clitics in BP, shying away from the possible implications in terms of the semantic differentiation between overt and null se constructions. This chapter focuses on reflexive, reciprocal and middle se constructions and aims to investigate what factors determine the choice between overt seconstructions and their null counterpart. Based on an extensive usage-feature and profile-based analysis, and using multivariate statistical methods, we show that reflexive, reciprocal and middle null se constructions are associated with a reconceptualization of an event as non-energetic or absolute, profiling the result of the event. On the other hand, the overt counterpart profiles the moment of change, construing the event as energetic. Reflexive and reciprocal constructions are more frequently encoded by an overt se construction whereas middle construction (in all its subcategories) is more frequently encoded by the null se construction. The study concludes that null reflexive, reciprocal and middle se constructions are new constructions semantically differentiated from overt se constructions, which, we argue, has wider implications, namely for reconceptualization of voice patterns in BP which tend towards ergativization.

While museum educators are essential to engage under‐served publics in science, their communication often reinforces dominant cultural norms and disengage visitors. Why are certain communication models so dominant and why are the cultural norms that underpin these so resistant to reconceptualisation? What conceptualizations about science communication are held by museum coordinators and how representative are they of the real practices? We explored these through an interpretative phenomenological approach in the context of a mobile museum with a social justice agenda. The analysis of museum coordinators' and museum educators' narratives, through the perspective of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs), shows that coordinators hold two dichotomous ICMs: a dominant deficit model and a non‐dominant participatory ICM. The data from museum educators, however, indicate the coexistence of blended practices, which attempt at establishing dialogue, but fail to align with the participatory model. This shows the difficulty in reconceptualising the deficit ICM, as it is deeply rooted in long‐standing enlightenment project of museums and reinforced by organizational factors.