What does an article carry with it after publication? Beyond the research findings and the choices made by whoever wrote it, an article retains the reviewers’ questions, the revisions prompted by editorial dialogue, the work of making graphs and images accessible, and the decisions that allow the text to reach its readers freely.
This issue of the newsletter opens with that journey, told by three authors who recently published in Cadernos de Linguística. Their experiences help show, from the inside, some of the commitments that guide the journal. They also set the stage for an important institutional announcement: Cadernos de Linguística’s entry into the Open Journals Collective, an international network dedicated to the sustainability of Diamond Open Access.
We then turn to six new publications: the intonation of synthetic speech compared to human speech, the vocal expressiveness of teachers, a project for a corpus of stuttered speech, the history of Portuguese-language teaching in Brazilian Linguistics, the discursive action of ANTRA, and the dossier on media, technologies, and artificial intelligence.
An article’s journey, told by those who lived it
We invited three authors who recently published in the journal to share how they experienced the path from submission to final version. Ramon de Almeida Miranda, with Ana Maria Sá Martins, is the author of the research report The discursive representation of Yglésio Moyses (PRTB) on the “Abrindo o Verbo” podcast, part of the dossier presented later in this issue. Neuda Lago wrote English-Language Literatures and Social Justice: critical, decolonial, and praxeological perspectives. Leandro Silveira de Araujo published The Emergence of Brazilian Grammar for Portuguese as a Foreign Language and the Contribution of Hermine W. Topker (1942), on the pioneering work in teaching Portuguese to foreigners in Brazil.
Ramon draws attention to the collaborative nature of peer review. Commenting on the reading done by Iran Ferreira de Melo and Lilian Noemia Guimarães, he recognizes that the reviewers’ contributions became part of the article’s own history:
Publishing in Cadernos de Linguística, I noticed that the commitment and attention given to both the article and the authors is a hallmark of the journal. From review to the final editing stage, every detail was handled with great care. First, I want to highlight that the contributions of reviewers Iran Ferreira de Melo and Lilian Noemia Guimarães were rigorous and significantly helped the research mature. So the richness of the work also carries a bit of each of them.
Another aspect Ramon mentions is accessibility. For him, thinking about scientific production for different audiences integrates the commitment to democratizing knowledge:
I was also struck by the journal’s concern with the accessibility of texts, which reinforces that scientific production should be designed for everyone, from a perspective of inclusion, diversity, and the democratization of knowledge. After all, a scientific text that cannot speak to different audiences loses part of its transformative potential.
He closes by linking publication to the social circulation of research:
It is very rewarding to see research developed at the university reach greater visibility through a journal committed to scientific quality and the dissemination of knowledge. So I want to express my joy at the opportunity to publish in Cadernos de Linguística and to help broaden discussions about discourse, spark critical perspectives, and perhaps contribute to transforming the social practices around us.
Neuda Lago describes the journal from a double vantage point, as both reader and author, and highlights the chance to bring together literature, language, education, and social justice:
My experience with Cadernos de Linguística has been very positive, both as a reader and as an author. The publication of the article “English-Language Literatures and Social Justice: critical, decolonial, and praxeological perspectives” was especially meaningful, as it brings together central threads of my trajectory as a researcher and teacher. In it, I think of literary education as a practice of reading and interpretation, but also as a space for listening, critical reflection, and confronting different forms of inequality and exclusion. Finding, in the journal, a space open to dialogue among literature, language, education, and social justice mattered a great deal to me. I also want to highlight the care, warmth, and clarity of the editorial team throughout the whole process. I feel honored to be part of a publication committed to academic rigor while also circulating critical, socially relevant perspectives.
Leandro Silveira de Araujo observes how the different stages of the editorial workflow work together toward improving the manuscript:
Publishing in Cadernos de Linguística was a memorable experience. I went through an editorial process quite different from what we’re used to in Linguistics, both in Brazil and abroad. Although the workflow has multiple stages, it’s clear that each one aims to give the final scientific work greater quality. The attention and care of the whole editorial team stand out for a precise, agile process that attends to every detail.
The three accounts describe a process of interlocution. Reviewers take part in the maturing of the research, authors find room to spell out the social dimension of their work, and editorial decisions work to broaden the possibilities for reading and using the texts.
From editorial care to a shared infrastructure
The relationship between editorial care and infrastructure also shows up in Cadernos de Linguística’s entry into the Open Journals Collective (OJC). The initiative brings together researchers, libraries, university presses, and nonprofit academic organizations working to build more sustainable and equitable forms of scholarly communication.
Under Diamond Open Access, authors don’t pay to publish and readers face no financial barriers to accessing the work. Even without charging fees, the journal still has to cover platforms, preservation, DOI registration, file preparation, metadata production, accessibility, and outreach, activities that require ongoing infrastructure and labor. The OJC aims precisely to strengthen journals that carry out this work without passing the costs on to authors or readers.
Joining the collective gives international visibility to a model the journal has practiced since its founding. Published by the Brazilian Linguistics Association (Abralin), Cadernos de Linguística maintains editorial independence, academic governance, and fully open access, with no revenue from APCs or subscriptions. Read the full announcement on the journal’s site, and see the journal’s dedicated page in the OJC catalogue, which gathers information on funding, publication languages, access policy, and institutional affiliation.
By joining the network, the journal comes to share challenges, solutions, and responsibilities with other community-led initiatives. The care described by the authors depends on institutional conditions able to sustain it over the long run.
Where human speech still stands apart from synthetic speech
In Exploring Intonational Contours in Human and Synthetic Speech: An F0-Based Study of Venezuelan Spanish, João Paulo Moraes Lima dos Santos (IF Sertão Pernambucano) and Eugenia San Segundo (CSIC) investigate a dimension that global acoustic measures don’t always capture: how fundamental frequency unfolds over time.
The study compares declarative and interrogative sentences produced by human speakers with synthetic renderings built from the same linguistic material. The voices generated by synthesis systems reproduce the broad intonational patterns associated with sentence type. The difference shows up in the details of the trajectory: human speech shows more localized shifts and greater internal variation, especially toward the end of sentences, while synthetic speech tends to smooth out the movement and produce gentler contours.
That divergence doesn’t show up as clearly in measures like overall F0 range or whole-utterance variability. The results indicate that assessing the naturalness of synthetic speech should include, alongside aggregate acoustic measures, the shape of the contour and how it develops over time.
The voice of those who teach
Voice is also examined as a professional instrument in Perceptual Analysis of Teachers’ Speech Expressiveness After Speech-Language Intervention, by Patricia Brianne da Costa Penha, Bárbara Tayná Santos Eugênio da Silva Dantas, Giordanna Emanuelle Ramos Nascimento, and Maria Fabiana Bonfim de Lima-Silva (UFPB).
Four teachers from a public school in Paraíba took part in weekly workshops on breathing, articulation, frequency and intensity modulation, resonance, and vocal warm-up. Before and after the intervention, samples of reading and classroom speech were recorded and later assessed by three evaluators using the VPA-PB protocol.
The preliminary results point to a reduction in hyperfunctional adjustments and roughness, an increase in frequency and intensity variation, and improved breath support. The study looks at vocal health in relation to expressiveness, prosodic flexibility, and phonatory effort, dimensions that affect classroom communication and how teachers relate to their daily work.
Understanding stuttering as a rhythmic process
Sandra Merlo (Unicamp) and Luciana Lucente (UFMG) present, in Building a Corpus to Analyze Stuttering According to a Dynamic Model of Speech Rhythm Production, the design for a corpus of stuttered speech in Brazilian Portuguese.
The article lays out the corpus design, its hypotheses, and the decisions that will guide data collection and annotation; at this stage, no empirical results are yet presented. The project is meant to gather data from children, adolescents, and adults, covering different degrees and profiles of stuttering, coexistence with cluttering, and recordings made before and after behavioral treatment.
Its key shift in perspective lies in not separating disfluencies from the rest of speech, and not treating them as a separate phenomenon. Drawing on the Dynamic Model of Speech Rhythm, stuttered and non-stuttered intervals will be examined as parts of a single, continuous temporal process. Vowel-to-vowel unit duration, rhythmic variability, the organization of stress groups, and clinical variables can then be analyzed together.
How Linguistics came to think about teaching Portuguese
In O ensino de Língua Portuguesa na História da Linguística brasileira (”The teaching of Portuguese in the history of Brazilian Linguistics”), Leonardo Gueiros (UFPB) traces four decades of debate, from the institutionalization of Linguistics in Brazil in the 1960s to the field’s consolidation and diversification by the late 1990s.
The article shows that the discipline’s presence in universities created the conditions for research oriented toward problems in teaching. From the second half of the 1970s on, discussions of grammar, reading, and writing began to incorporate a view of language as a socio-discursive practice. Sociolinguistics, Text Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis helped challenge the equation of Portuguese-language teaching with the transmission of normative rules, and put linguistic diversity at the center of the educational debate.
The history reconstructed there traces, beyond the theories themselves, the institutions, associations, journals, collective projects, and people who created the conditions for new ideas about language and teaching to be produced and to circulate across the country.
When a pamphlet becomes a form of action
Language appears in an even more explicitly interventionist role in Ação social e discursiva da Cartilha “Não existe cadeia humanizada!” da Associação Nacional de Travestis e Transexuais no combate à transfobia (ANTRA) (”The social and discursive action of the pamphlet ‘There is no humanized prison!’ by the National Association of Travestis and Transsexuals in the fight against transphobia”), by Marcos Antonio Rodrigues Nascimento, Priscilla Araújo de Figueiredo Freitas, and Viviane Cristina Vieira (UnB).
Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies from a decolonial perspective, the authors analyze a publication by ANTRA about LGBTQIA+ people deprived of liberty. The analysis considers, beyond the final text, the planning, production, multisemiotic resources, distribution methods, interlocutors, and social conditions of circulation.
The pamphlet identifies the practices and agents that sustain institutionalized transphobia, denounces the disregard for the law within the prison system, and calls for structural change. Producing and distributing this material is thus part of the association’s own political action: a way of documenting violations and disputing meanings in the fight against exclusion.
Politics and meaning-making in technological environments
This issue also marks the publication of the introduction to the dossier Media, Technologies, Artificial Intelligence: Analyses of Political-Discursive Practices, edited by Evandra Grigoletto (UFPE), Silmara Dela Silva (UFF), and Solange Maria Leda Gallo (Unisul), which opens with an essay by the guest editors, “IA para o bem de todos”? Discurso, sujeito, contradição.
Born out of a thematic symposium held at Abralin’s 14th International Congress, the collection brings together eight contributions from researchers across different regions, institutions, and career stages. Its objects range from comment moderation on social media to political representation in podcasts, generative models, Brazil’s National AI Plan, subject-avatars, browsing practices, archives on X, and AI-generated political videos.
The papers examine how technologies take part in producing and circulating discourse. Platforms, browsers, databases, and artificial intelligence systems regulate visibility, distribute subject positions, reproduce inequalities, and also open space for resistance and political contest.
The work that continues after publication
The pieces in this issue follow their own separate agendas. Some focus on the acoustic materiality of speech; others interrogate educational practices, build research infrastructure, reconstruct disciplinary history, or trace forms of political action. That variety is part of what a Linguistics journal should make possible.
The testimonials that open this newsletter are a reminder, in the end, that none of this work reaches its readers alone. Once published, an article begins to circulate among new readers, carrying with it the dialogue among authors, reviewers, and editors that helped shape it.
Cadernos de Linguística follows the Diamond Open Access model: authors don’t pay to submit or publish, and readers don’t pay to access the articles.