Carta da Editora

Abstract

This volume was supposed to be a special issue on lexicology, but our call for papers did not attract many articles. Therefore our readers will find a set of only three articles about that theme and then a sequence of other seven papers with studies on the following topics: contrastive analysis, teacher education, discourse analysis, and language and technology. In the first group, Brangel discusses the contributions of Cognitive Semantics to the writing of explanatory paraphrases found in Portuguese learner's dictionaries with minimum of 3,500 and maximum of 10,000 entries. The author criticizes the evaluation parameter specified by the Brazilian Ministry of Education for dictionaries and concludes that dictionaries do not offer users a satisfactory functional reference work. Then, Oliveira, in a summary of her MA study, evaluates how two concepts-the homonymic solution and the polysemous solution-influences the structures of dictionaries and then gives suggestions for the production of learner's dictionaries in the light of Cognitive Semantics. The last text, by Freitas, uses the methodology of corpus linguistics to describe Portuguese language affective vocabulary, especially in informal contexts. Farías describes differences and similarities in intonation in tag questions, wh-questions, inverted questions, and repetition questions uttered by native English speakers and ESL Spanish speakers. Two articles focus on teacher education. Xavier, using Chronos and Aion as metaphors, discusses the temporal dimension of foreign language teaching practice. She claims that the teachers' time is different from the students' and that the latter should be allowed to spend more time to think about the language they are learning. Mateus analyzes representations of English language teacher collaborative practices, from the perspective of student teachers and shows the tensions between the two metaphors used to talk about collaboration. A pair of articles presents studies in discourse analysis. Jesus and Zolin-Vesz analyze an article about the artist Xuxa in a Brazilian magazine and demonstrate how the text constructs her image as "a promoter of social inclusion, particularly regarding children with Down syndrome". In the second article, Signor states that discourse about students with attention deficit hyperactivity may affect one's subjectivity and learning. In order to demonstrate her hypothesis, she presents a case study to prove that pathologization of education can trigger a kind of discourse which stigmatizes the student and creates an unfavorable learning context. The last pair of articles deals with digital technologies. Miranda presents the results of her master research. By means of a survey she investigated the "state of art" of research about writing and digital information and communication reported in master's and doctorate's studies from 1999 to 2010 in Brazil. Last, but not least, Buzato, Silva, Coser. Barros and Sachs discuss the various concepts of two new textual forms, remix and mashup, production technique...