Abstract
The present paper aims to investigate why Brazilian teachers may have the impression that Chinese exchange students frequently produce the expression “de fato”(“in fact” or “actually” in English), which is not so commonly used among Brazilian speakers. The study was developed in four stages: 1) an analysis of the entries of “de fato” from Portuguese, Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Chinese dictionaries, and a review of previous linguistic studies on these words; 2) a compilation of two corpora in Portuguese, consisting of academic texts written by Brazilians and Chinese students; 3) a classification of “de fato” from a pragmatic point of view; 4) a contrastive analysis of the pragmatic strategy for using the expression in the two corpora. The results show that although Chinese learners more frequently produce the expression “de fato” in their academic texts, the different pragmatic strategies used in contextual communications may be the main reason for drawing the attention of native Portuguese speakers.
Highlights
The interest in learning Portuguese as an additional language has increased rapidly around China
The paper attempts to answer the question of why Chinese learners frequently produce the expression “de fato” in Portuguese
We collected 122 academic texts in Portuguese - 61 produced by Brazilians and 61 Chinese
Summary
The interest in learning Portuguese as an additional language has increased rapidly around China. Portuguese, Chinese learners who study at the Pontifical Catholic University of Brazil (PUCRS) more frequently produce the expression “de fato” (“” or “” in English) in their spoken and written discourse, which is not commonly used among Brazilian speakers. “” and “”), and others try to verify their potential differences These previous studies can illustrate our understanding of this type of expression and research methodology, but they cannot explain the use of “de fato” in Brazilian Portuguese. For this reason, we discuss the pragmatic use of “de fato” in Portuguese, based on real data, and try to find a way to incorporate all the meanings and concepts mentioned above
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