FFCS - Teses de Doutoramento / Doctoral Theses
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- O evento Fátima : análise do impacto de Fátima na vida dos peregrinosPublication . Moreira, Manuel Paulo Baptista Alves; Leite, Ângela Maria Teixeira; Lind, Andreas GonçalvesThe present work is based on the most significant historical documents that relate to the phenomenon of apparitions and that served as a background for the interpretation of the Fátima event. We refer, above all, to the information available in the Memoirs of Lúcia de Jesus (Jesus, 2016), in the various volumes of the Critical Documentation of Fátima and in the Theological Commentary (Mensagem de Fátima, n.d.) signed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on June 26, 2000, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The analysis of these documents allowed us to frame the meaning of apparition, as a mystical vision and a subjective experience. Starting from the analysis of these texts, we seek to describe – one could say, phenomenologically – the effective transformation that the Fátima event wrought in the lives of the visionaries. In other words, it is about identifying the effects of such an experience on the whole person, on the ordinary existence of the first witnesses of the Apparitions. Next, we looked at the experience of the pilgrims, to whom the message of Fátima was transmitted after the six Apparitions of 1917. It was a question of basically evaluating the impact that the Fátima event, in a second moment, had on the pilgrims. The assessment of this impact was carried out through a survey collecting sociodemographic data, whose information allowed respondents to be placed in relation to the following psychometric scales: “self-compassion”, “satisfaction with life”, “perceived freedom”, “martyrdom”, “availability to listen”, “acceptance” and “centrality of religiousity”. The substance of the investigation was obtained from interviews that aimed to reconstruct the individual psychobiographies of the pilgrims. In these, special attention was paid to the transformations that occurred at a personal level, relationships and ways of life, evaluating the impact of the pilgrimage experience on the way one experiences a fragile situation, such as an illness or a separation, for example. Of all the results obtained, the following stand out: (i) the transition of the first seers from simple “shepherds” to the status of prophets, without the occurrence of psychic trauma; (ii) apparitions, like pilgrimages, have the same structure as rites of passage; (iii) the motivation to endeavor a pilgrimage stops being extrinsic (e.g. family tradition) and becomes intrinsic (e.g. supported by subjective faith); (iv) pilgrimage contributes decisively both to personal self-knowledge and to the decentering that leads the pilgrim to become more attentive and careful with others. Based on an interdisciplinary approach that integrates elements of sociology, psychology and, naturally, religious sciences, this investigation offers an important contribution to the Fátima Studies: (1) firstly, because it presents the construction of the psychohistory of the “little shepherds ”, something that has not yet been done; (2) secondly, because it allows us to verify that the experience of the Apparitions manifests itself with the structure of the rites of passage.
- Recipient passives in the Portuguese of Mozambique : a sociocognitive approach to a constructional innovation in a nativising varietyPublication . Mevis, Alice Marie-Paule Emmanuel; Silva, Augusto Soares daThis PhD dissertation investigates the ongoing nativisation of the Mozambican variety of Portuguese, through the lens of one specific syntactic innovation: the Recipient passive construction. This construction, which occurs with TRANSFER verbs, is a type of ditransitive passive which promotes the recipient, rather than the theme, to subject position – an innovation absent in the grammar of European Portuguese and other national varieties of Portuguese. Although previous studies on Mozambican Portuguese (MP) have consistently mentioned the Recipient passive, it remains unclear whether this constructional innovation represents transitional variation due to second language acquisition or a structural change in progress. The present study therefore proposes a detailed examination of these innovative passive structures from both linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, following the theoretical framework of Cognitive (Socio)Linguistics (e.g., Geeraerts & Cuyckens 2007, Wen & Taylor 2021; Kristiansen & Dirven 2008, Geeraerts et al. 2010) and the grammatical models of Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg 2006, Diessel 2019) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008). By assessing the systematicity and productivity of the Recipient passive in MP and mapping its linguistic and social distribution, this dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of grammatical change in postcolonial varieties of Portuguese. The dissertation is structured into two parts and comprises ten chapters. Part I lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the analysis, beginning with an overview of Mozambique’s sociolinguistic landscape (Chapter 2). This contextual background helps explain the conditions under which the new Recipient passive construction has emerged and the broader dynamics shaping MP’s current nativisation process. The discussion draws on Schneider’s (2003, 2007) Dynamic Model for World Englishes – which aligns with Cognitive (Socio)Linguistics in its view of language as a dynamic and adaptive complex system –, extending its applicability to African varieties of Portuguese. The nativisation of MP is reflected in the increasing number of monolingual Portuguese speakers, particularly in urban centres. Historically, Mozambique’s population primarily spoke Bantu languages, with Portuguese functioning as a second language (L2). However, following independence in 1975, Portuguese began to play an increasingly significant role, first as a reinforced lingua franca and later as a native language (L1), largely due to its institutional status and the mass expansion of Portuguese-medium education across the country. This ongoing shift, which comes at a cost to indigenous languages, clearly demonstrates how the sociolinguistic landscape of a country can undergo profound transformation within a relatively short period. The remaining sections of Part I establish the theoretical (Chapters 3 and 4) and methodological (Chapter 5) framework of the analysis. First, by shifting the focus from a derivational syntax-based model to a constructional approach – where grammar is conceived as a dynamic network of interrelated constructions –, this study offers a more comprehensive, integrated and economical account of linguistic change, particularly in the domains of semantic and syntactic change. Second, by incorporating semantic considerations, especially regarding the concept of transitivity, it underscores the conceptual coherence and plausibility of the emergence of alternative grammatical structures. Lastly, by shifting the perspective from linguistic structures and languages in contact to speakers in contact, it accounts for the complexity of multilingualism and diglossia, which are typical of postcolonial contexts where individuals with diverse linguistic repertoires and worldviews interact. This dissertation thus embraces a cognitive and constructional approach to linguistic structure, variation and change, speaker-centred and empirically grounded in corpus and survey data, while also attending to the complex sociolinguistic dynamics of postcolonial settings. This perspective reveals the intricate interplay between the grammatical system of Portuguese, Bantu contact languages, culturally embedded mental representations and (presumed universal) cognitive factors underlying language use, in line with Cognitive Sociolinguistics and Cognitive Contact Linguistics. Part II constitutes the empirical core of this dissertation, focusing on an in-depth exploration of the Recipient passive construction in MP. The investigation unfolds in four key stages. First, a preliminary analysis highlights the need to move beyond the derivational hypothesis of transitivisation proposed in previous studies (e.g., Gonçalves 2010), which considers Recipient passives to be the outcome of a structural shift in ditransitive verbs involving the loss of the preposition a ‘to’ that introduces indirect objects in standard Portuguese (Chapter 6). Second, an initial corpus analysis examines the conceptual foundations of ditransitive and passive constructions, allowing to delineate the context of occurrence of Recipient passives and better understand the motivations behind their emergence. This analysis sketches the linguistic profile of the Recipient passive construction and confirms its systematicity and productivity within MP (Chapter 7). Third, a second corpus-based study, employing advanced multivariate statistical techniques, investigates the innovative Recipient passive in relation to its closest structural counterpart, the Theme passive construction (or standard ditransitive passive). Using random forest models and conditional inference trees, the analysis reveals a constructional alternation primarily governed by pragmatic-discursive factors (such as topicality and accessibility) as well as conceptual factors, particularly the perspective through which the transfer event is construed, either as a result-oriented or process-oriented event (Chapter 8). Finally, the last case study explores the social dimension of the Recipient passive by means of an acceptability judgment task conducted in four Mozambican cities over a ten-week fieldwork period. This experimental analysis provides insights into the speakers’ perception and usage of the construction (Chapter 9). The main findings of this dissertation, resulting from the four analyses conducted in Part II, demonstrate that: (i) the emergence of the Recipient passive construction in MP reflects an ongoing process of constructionalisation (Traugott & Trousdale 2013), rather than a derivational restructuring; (ii) this Mozambican innovation has become a stable form-meaning pairing with a coherent semantic structure, exhibiting increasing degrees of schematicity and productivity; (iii) the new grammatical construction represents structured variation, responsive to a set of intralinguistic criteria, including discursive salience and conceptual perspectivisation (or construal, Langacker 2008), and has moreover naturally integrated into the constructional network of Portuguese, interacting with pre-existing grammatical patterns; and finally, (iv) Recipient passive constructions are widely accepted across different regions of Mozambique, and among speakers with diverse linguistic backgrounds and educational levels, suggesting that they are no longer confined to specific social groups or speaker profiles. By examining the development and productivity of the Recipient passive construction in MP, this thesis sheds light on the mechanisms of linguistic change in postcolonial varieties. These findings, in turn, contribute to a broader understanding of the ongoing nativisation process of African varieties of Portuguese, while also documenting further the increasingly pluricentric nature of the Portuguese language on the global stage (Soares da Silva 2018, 2022).