[Contrastive analysis of Portuguese and German: a study of animacy in academic articles]

This article proposes a contrastive study between Portuguese and German based on Systemic-Functional Linguistics ( Halliday; Matthiessen 2014 ). It aims to investigate how grammar construes animacy meanings in clauses of these two languages. Halliday, McIntosh, and Strevens ( 1964 ) and Krzeszowski ( 1990 ) point out that all languages can be compared since they have theoretical and descriptive categories that can establish equivalence between them. A comparable corpus was compiled using academic articles in Portuguese and German ( Tognini-Bonelli 2010 ). After this, the linguistic analysis of semiotic objects was performed in each language to enable the contrastive investigation. The results indicate that Portuguese and German have similar behavior at first sight, nonetheless the in-depth analysis uncovers that Portuguese uses semiotic objects in more active clauses than German.

Keywords:
contrastive analysis; Systemic-Functional Linguistics; Portuguese; German; animacy