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The aim of this paper is to analyze metaphors about the social outbreak in editorials, from Diario El Sur and Diario Concepción, two of Concepción's local newspapers. The corpus was composed of 23 editorials from these newspapers. Metaphor identification was done through Discourse Dynamics Approach to Metaphor. A total of 653 metaphors was found, which was then grouped, resulting in a total sum of 268 metaphors for the analysis. In this research, the editorial perspective about the social outbreak of two local newspapers was studied through metaphor. In both media outlets, similar metaphor vehicles were used. While Diario El Sur prioritizes the need for normalization, Diario Concepción legitimates the demonstrations as an expression of social discontent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experience of constructing the current 1st to 10th grade Language curriculum in Chile. A central underlying assumption is that the curricular text not only corresponds to an institutional authorship, but is also a discursive process in which curriculum developers and other intervening voices put into play their beliefs, ideologies and knowledge. Using a narrative approach, memories and reflections on this process were recovered through four dialogical interviews with the curriculum team. The results reveal tensions in the curricular discourse regarding the sources and contents of knowledge, as well as the conceptualization of its recipients. A discussion is offered on how the disciplinary and didactic dimensions of language and literature are integrated in the discourse and in the curricular text with definitions of the type of person and the type of society to which the curricular policy is oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the media discourses about gender violence of Spanish and Italian newspapers on Facebook, focusing on the aggressors. Analyzing the ideology, we see if the news let infer a social or a patriarchal perspective about gender violence, considering both newspapers and users' discourses. We adopt the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, with a linguistic-discoursive glance and with a journalistic one. And with a linguistic-cognitive-semiotic and analytical methodology. Results tell us that the Spanish and Italian press represent the aggressors through a patriarchal ideology, influencing the users' discourses. Moreover, both in the newspaper discourses and in the users', we find differences between Spanish and Italian texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign languages educators are still looking for research methods that could allow them to embrace and comprehend the complexity of language teaching and learning. It was within this framework the methodology called action-research has been applied: to study a social situation in which the researchers faces the intention of improving it. The method was created and described by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s through his social experiments. In foreign language teaching, the term refers to a wide range of strategies implemented to improve the educational system of teaching and learning. According to their methodological principles, the research is conducted by the same person who acts and makes decisions combining the role of a researcher and a teacher. The main goal is to identify action strategies that are implemented and later subjected to observation, reflection and possible changes. In this paper the author focuses on the possibilities and limitations that the action research represents for didactics researcher. His own experience based on this methodology is a point of reference for this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic literacy studies have shown that the main weakness manifested by students who join an academic community are focused on the difficulty of texts comprehension from their discipline. The lexicon plays an important role on this point, since the quantity and quality of the personal lexicon will influence this process. In the case of this paper, we will present the results of the normative study applied to students of the Faculty of Education of a Chilean regional university to measure the variables of concretion and familiarity. The surveys that make up this study were created from a base of 536 words, obtained from five compulsory bibliographical references of an area of sociology of education through computational analysis and refined according to criteria of extension, initial syllable and frequency. The conclusions of the paper shows that the relationships between both indices are linear, but not strong, which validates the hypothesis that the more familiar a word is, the more concrete it is perceived by the speaker. The data also establish that the words that are perceived as unfamiliar and not very specific are the least, although their distribution does not respond to a normal curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of a corpus of 12 testimonies of children who have remained in contact with their heritage languages (HL) in different virtual contexts, this paper analyses the potentials and shortcomings of the aforementioned technological media, as well as the preferences detected. In order to get closer to the network of beliefs that these students hold about their HL, we launched a narrative proposal in which they would portray themselves as learners (in the case of participating in virtual classes), but, especially, as global consumers of networks and channels in these languages. The ultimate aim would be not to overlook these representations, with a view to incorporating them into the training of future teachers in multilingual contexts. The first results point to a preference for face-to-face vs. online teaching, shared television consumption in the family and a prevalence of the telephone as an anchor with their speech community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the result of a didactic experience carried out within the framework of the subject of English Language Didactics, part of the Master's Degree in Teacher Training for Compulsory Secondary Education and Baccalaureate, Vocational Training and Language Teaching, given at an online university. For this reason, the subjects of this piece of research are future English teachers who are studying their degree online. Digital competence should be fostered at the university stage, as an intrinsic part of students' training as future teachers. Therefore, examining students' self-perception can be a starting point for implementing programmes to improve this competence. In order to measure their self-perception, they answer a questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of the subject. This is a subject in which the teacher introduces numerous digital tools, both in the synchronous online classes, as well as for asynchronous activities, thinking about the future teaching practice of the students. The result of the experience has shown that the students' self-perception concerning their digital competence decreases when they become aware of the high number of tools they were unfamiliar with before starting the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing interest in the development of writing in tertiary education has led to the emergence of a great diversity of programs which aim to support students in the task of communicating academically within their disciplines. Considering this context, this paper presents some of the theoretical options and strategic actions carried out in order to develop a writing program in Chilean tertiary education. The integration of diverse theoretical approaches is discussed, with focus on the contributions of each theory for the main purposes of the program. In addition, strategic decisions related to the development of the program are described, advancing its relevance for the creation of a writing program that acknowledges the needs and ruling principles of the institution where it emerges, in order to develop an organic relation with it. The paper aims to contribute to the domain of writing programs in Chile and Latin America, proposing a model that could address the growing need of teaching writing tertiary institutions face in these contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among other textual and multimodal resources (GIF, stickers and meme), emojis are elements that allow, increasingly, managing much of expressiveness in digital written interaction. In fact, they function as contextualization keys of statements. Our research aims to investigate some emojis interpretative diversity and explain some features that they fulfil. Continuing a previous investigation, which allowed us to identify the emojis most used in messaging environments (in particular, WhatsApp), this paper analyzes data from two surveys applied to 70 speakers, frequent users of social networks. Based on different questions, we request to indicate how they value and interpret emojis without context and with context. The results indicate that the most commonly used emojis are more monosemantic and they express positive evaluative content, so that suggests a certain consensus of interpretation. On the contrary, the under-utilized emojis presented greater polysemy but, in such cases, the context allows the disambiguation of their meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we deal with an area of possession in Spanish, that of the prenominal possessive adjective, one of the most frequently used resources to express possession in Spanish. We place special emphasis on the form that refers to the third grammatical person su(s), prenominal modifier of a noun with which it forms a noun phrase that expresses a relation of possession, in which the prenominal possessive refers to the possessor entity as that the noun refers to the possessed entity. We propose that this form performs a series of functions, additional to its basic function of possession, some of more syntactic basis, others related to pragmatic-discursive factors: i) it is a discursive resource of topic retrieval; ii) it is a disambiguating element in constructions in which it presents more than one possible referent in the context; iii) is a resource that in certain discursive contexts encodes possession with expressive values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delimitation is an essential requirement for our trade with external stimuli to produce a cognitive experience. The processing of a complex of dynamic stimuli requires its segmentation into temporal-individuals (Situations), a segmentation operationalized in the languages through the constitution of limits. The properties that define the different types of linguistic limits do not all correspond to extralinguistic realities, they also result from impositions of 'design' provided by cognitive and communicative factors, respectively, presuppositions and implicatures. The objective of this paper is to identify different types of limits that segment the Situations in Spanish to define them later in terms of an integration of semantic, cognitive and pragmatic properties. The methodology consists of, first, exhausting the description in terms of truth conditions of the content that constitutes a limit in an expression to then show the insufficiency of that description and thus finally resorting to pragmatic categories to grasp it" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to characterize, from the perspective of generative grammar, two expressions associated with mood that appear in Spanish in contact with Guarani (especially in Paraguay): lento and un poco, which are correlated with similar forms used in Rioplatense Spanish and in Guarani. In particular, we explore the possibility of analysing both elements as 'attenuators', which are described by the pragmatic-grammatical literature as elements that are used to mitigate or relativize the impact of the assertions in a specific strategy of politeness (cfr. Caffi 1999), or to deactivate the illocutive force of an act (Landone 2009). We believe that the notion of attenuation cannot be subsumed into other grammatical features, as 'possibility' or 'approximation', both related to the epistemic mood, and that it can be integrated in a generative analysis, in particular, in the cartographic analysis summarized in Cinque & Rizzi (2016), combined with the proposal of the categorial projections Sv, Sa, Sn in the framework of Distributed Morphology (cf. Marantz 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Andean Spanish varieties in contact with Quechua and Aymara indirect evidential and mirative values are documented for the pluperfect. Furthermore, the perfecto compuesto (=English Present Perfect) usually adopts a purely aoristive value, i. e. ha venido (lit. (s)he has come) 'he came', but additionally expressing direct evidence. This paper aims at tackling the evidential values of haber + participle as derived from the interrelation between temporal units, an idea previously adopted in the study of other languages. Namely, it is proposed here that the nature of the evidence derives from the interaction between the event time and an 'evidence time', in which the speaker has evidence available to assert p, so that the overlap between both times indicates direct evidence and the lack of overlapping indirect evidence. This allows to explain, in addition, the apparent contradiction posed by certain uses of the pluperfect where the evidence is direct, e. g. habías sido vos, lit. 'it had been you' [while seeing the hearer]: there the overlap is partial, so that there is indirect evidence of the initial subinterval and direct evidence of the final subinterval. Adding speech time (or some equivalent evaluation time) to this schema additionally allows to account for the mirative values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this work is Talmy's analysis (1985, 2000) of the semantic composition of movement events and his distinction between verbal frame languages -Spanish and Romance languages- in which the Trajectory is encoded in the verb and the Manner is expressed in an attached satellite, and the languages of satellite frame -Indo-European, except Romance languages, Latin, Chinese, and Russian- in which the verb codifies the Manner and the Trajectory is expressed on a satellite. In this paper some cases are studied that depart from the lexicalization patterns mentioned for the languages of verbal frame and those of satellite frame and which are characterized by the fusion in the verbal root of the movement and the Figure. For the analysis of the examples, the aspectual nature of the events involved in the constructions analyzed and semantic distinctions such as scalarity and gradualness will be taken into account (Rapaport & Levin 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the theoretical and practical implications of an academic writingteaching innitiative which emphasizes the role of the teacher and peer tutor as active observers of the different discursive forms of their disciplines, based on the analysis of their own literacy practices, through the identification of the functions and prototypical structures of academic texts in use and their role in the construction of knowledge. Since 2014, the program has promoted the implementation of this model, through tutorial support to students and pedagogical support to teachers to promote these skills across the curriculum, with the purpose not only of developing verbal skills, but also epistemological and heuristics that allow all actors to validate and consolidate their discursive and disciplinary knowledge based on the reflection on their literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborates on the theoretical principles that have oriented the design of reading and writing programs and on the strategies that have been followed in their implementation. It aims to offer generalizations that can be useful to different institutional and geographical contexts. Different relevant issues are theoretically discussed: Literacy programs' teaching objects; appropriate methodologies for effective learning and teachers' role in this process; professional teams to whom assign this responsibility; and, consequently, the institutional place of a program of this kind. Additionally, the fundamental strategies that contribute to the implementation of these programs are explored, specially taking into account the need to sustain in time these initiatives across the different degrees in the universities and higher educational institutions where they would be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to propose a basic SFL account of Spanish clause moods from the viewpoint of the paradigmatic relations defining their organisation into systems, and the structural patterns motivating such organisation. First, the discourse-semantic motivations of this account are addressed, that is, basic speech functions are related to the distinction into imperative, declarative and interrogative clauses. Moving onto the lexicogramatical stratum, these distinctions are then reviewed as interpersonal choices in a mood system, in close relation to structural patterns motivating, in specific ways, the organisation of such choices in Spanish. The approach proposed here is assumed to have key implications both for comparison across languages already described in SFL terms, and for descriptive work focused on Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the most relevant syntactic-textual similarities and differences between interrogative infinitives in Spanish and in French. In order to do so, we analyse two corpora consisting of 250 texts, basing our criteria on previous studies and own observations. The results of our study contribute to contrastive linguistics, particularly to the syntactic-textual studies of the independent infinitives in both languages. Our results indicate that the most important similarities are that 85% of both corpora are partial interrogative infinitives. Besides, more than 70% of these partial interrogative infinitives appear in the titles and sub-titles of different jussive texts. The most relevant difference is that in the French corpus we found a greater significant quantity of interrogative infinitives than in the Spanish corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of our paper, we will present the main results of a study about background languages' role (Spanish L1 and English L2) in French L3 interlanguage construction through the analysis of some syntactic transfers in structures like "Verb + (Preposition) + Noun phrase or Infinitive" and "Verb + Object pronoun". We analyzed 484 written productions made in 2013 and 2014 by 28 first-year students of the Translation/Interpretation program of Universidad de Concepción, in Chile. In the second part, we will use these results to outline some didactic principles concerning these particular grammatical structures. We want to propose some work and reflection guidelines to foreign language teachers who deal with similar multilingual teaching/learning situations and we hope we can show them why it is important to be aware of background languages' influence in a third language acquisition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyzes the debates which were held during the 1944 National Constituent Assembly, which was known to be the most progressive one Ecuador had during the 20th century. Such Assembly was also the first one to recognize Quechua language, though it did not acknowledge the right to vote to illiterates. This recognition would have meant an advance in the indigenous peoples´ pursue for their rights and the possibility for them to be politically positioned. This period was also characterized by Velasco Ibarra's strong presence, which had an influence on the derogation of the 1945 Constitution. The aim of this paper is to identify which were the factors that influenced the denial to universal suffrage. Finally this work also analyzes Velasco´s speech about the mestizo within the context of Ecuador joining United Nations. This will allow us to understand his vision on national culture and the reasons which led him to derogate linguistic diversity rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we review the relation between politics, language planning and metalinguistic reflections about the Mapudungun language in the first half of the 17th century in Chile. This was a decisive time as the strategies and planning of the spiritual conquest of the indigenous people were being discussed and planned out. Luis de Valdivia, a Jesuit from Granada, was the main proponent in explaining the defensive war. Valdivia's work can be considered missionary linguistics, and within it one can differentiate between metalinguistics and religious instruction. In this paper we focus on his metalinguistic writings and we describe his Arte y gramática (1606), a piece which we understand as a methodological, systematic way of implementing the defensive war, and as a result of the institutionalization of the predominating discourse of the Catholic Church and the Spanish throne in order to conquer Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to define the features of the periphrasis be 'estar' + participle, versus the same verb be 'estar' + participle, in not periphrastic but attributive structures, in current Spanish language. From a literary corpus of different genres, the analysis of the constructions includes both syntactic and semantic factors to discriminate the properties of the periphrasis from those of the attributive structure; and it also compares the structures be 'estar' + participle and be 'ser' + participle, a highly grammaticalized periphrasis, in order to prove that they have similar syntactic behavior, and therefore they are members of the same paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the use, during 2010 and 2011, of the phrases "Bicentennial Generation" and "Bicentennial Youth" in public speeches by the ex President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. We believe that the reference of the phrase develops a series of changes: first, "Bicentennial Generation" refers to the generation of Cristina Fernandez and, after a coexistence of both meanings, it refers to today's youth. In order to understand the change, we will observe the social action in which the text is involved and the different assessments and modalizations that are ascribed to the phrase "Bicentennial Generation". We will take analysis tools from Socio-Discursive Interactionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to defend the need to change the way of teaching the history of literature. To do this, we start from the premise that such a change must be generated as early as in the teacher training. Thus, we show, first, an anthropological (in both meanings -"holistic" and "human") conception of literature, based on the concept of "context of production" and, secondly, we offer a teaching experience with undergraduate students from a Spanish university, where we decided to test the template of literary analysis, in general, with great results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic communication goes from the reality and the semantics to the syntactic expression (perspective of the sender) and from the syntactic expression to the semantics and the reality (perspective from the recipient). It is the task of linguists to place at the disposal of the scientific community and therefore of teachers and students instruments of description and interpretation that allow them to understand and retrace mentally the processes of phrase formation and accordingly to produce well-formed sentences in an explicit way. Traditional and modern formalistic grammars offer ways and methods of analysis that are insufficient in order to master communication semantically and pragmatically. In this paper we offer a propositional method that allows to make analytically explicit the triad syntax - pragmatics -semantics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze some contributions made by intonation - specifically pitch level choices- to the organization of interactive discourse. The corpus comprises narrative fragments embedded in 60 casual conversations among university students aged between 18- 28 from different universities in Argentina. We adopt the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Liguistics (Halliday y Matthiessen 2004, Martin y Rose 2008) and the Theory of Discourse Intonation (Brazil 1997, Granato 2005). We analyze the meaning projected by pitch level both at the micro level of the utterance and/or dyad and at the meso level of narrative fragments. The analysis reveals that pitch level choices at the local level make a substantial contribution to the co-construction of coherence; while at the meso level they contribute to the characterization of narrative fragments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Causal constructions are a type of improper adverbial subordinate constructions. As it has been previously analyzed, causal conjunctions in different languages are specialized in different types of interpretation. In Spanish, conjuncion que and como que can be used in subordinate contexts or introducing an independent sentence. In this paper, I will search for the special values of que and como que in causal interpretations: when they head a subordinate structure or an independent sentence. Following Garrido (2013) I will accept that speaker can connect two constituents in the discourse. The mechanisms that allow speakers connect two sentences can vary and depend on the conjunction. In causal constructions, the source of information and the speaker's volition are the ways to connect two sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the most relevant syntactic features that characterize a corpus consisting of fifty baseball headlines and their relationship with the rest of the article. In this study, we wish to compare and contrast syntactic characteristics between the baseball headlines and the articles. First, we identified the syntactic features in the headlines, more specifically the type of construction and its configuration. After that, we examined the articles identifying anaphors and verbal tenses and moods. The most important feature we found is that the main referent, which is presented in the headline in the form of brief noun phrases,is reconsidered very regularly throughout the article through a diversity of noun phrases of different lengths. Moreover, although verbal moods and tenses of the headlines do not coincide with those of the baseball article, there is perfect cohesion and coherence in the journalistic text as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morpheme-based model faces itself with troubles at describing discontinuous morphemes, as well as other ill-behaved morphemes from a structural point of view (empty, accumulative, substitutive, etc.). The analysis of the parasynthetic word-formation in Spanish results problematic because the notion of linearity is violated and the binary formation of the words is broken. In this paper, we present an analysis of the causative verbs in /enXar/ of the type embotellar, 'to bottle', through a model that establishes schematic relationships among words. Through the bidirectional scheme: [/enXar/V 'poner x'] ↔ [/X/N 'x'], (embotellar, 'to bottle') ↔ (botella, 'bottle'), that relates verbs with nominal forms, we demonstrate this analysis is more relevant from a cognitive point of view because it is more attached to the intuition of the speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the most common errors produced by a group of speakers of Chilean Spanish, learners of English as a second language, when pronouncing consonant segments. The corpus includes 540 sentences recorded by two groups of students of the Bachelor's degree in English language and literature at Universidad de Chile. One group is composed by third-year students and the second group is formed by students of fourth (and last) year of the same program. Once the sentences were recorded, the researchers analyzed the deviances in the pronunciation of consonant sounds by contrasting them to the ideal forms established by pronouncing dictionaries of the standard variety of English known as Received Pronunciation. The results show that the most common deviances, in both groups, are those caused by graphemic interference and that the group that committed the biggest number of deviant forms was the one composed by third-year students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lecture of the subject 'Discourse Analysis' for the programmes of Arts and Communication Sciences of the Faculty of Arts at the National University of Tucumán, leads us to argue that the systematic processing of the concepts of 'community', 'genre', 'competence' and 'strategy' is unavoidable to ensure the students' development of critical reading and writing skills, that are basics in order to undertake research in the context of discourse studies. The approach of these concepts, with their respective terminological questioning, has become a very useful teaching tool. The diagnosis made is the generator of this paper that is intended as a theoretical reflection on the relevance that these notions assume in the context of teaching and learning processes in the curricular subject 'Discourse Analysis', in order to offer an alternative instrument that enables to optimize the performance of teaching practices in this field of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the scientific contribution of Dr. Rodolfo Lenz, German scholar, to the knowledge of Mapuche or Mapudungu(n), the main indigenous language of Chile, and the culture associated with it. His task was therefore ethnolinguistic, based on data obtained from competent native speakers. More than a century later, his work is still valid, and its knowledge is mandatory for those seeking to explore thoroughly the Mapuche culture and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexico is a country with very rich culture and languages, however, indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing due to certain factors that cause that cause their replacement by the Spanish language. In recent times (2003) it was published the General Law of Linguistics Rights of Indigenous Peoples (LGDLPI by its Spanish acronym) which aims to preserve and develop the indigenous languages. This paper analyzes the situation of indigenous languages in their social context: on the one hand, there is a law in their favor and the other, a reality where their speakers are discriminated. The study confronts that which is established by the law and the specific situation of the speakers, which has caused the loss and replacement of their language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines, from a historical, anthropological and linguistic perspective, various attempts to regulate the relationship between the Mapuche language and Spanish in Chile, from the activity of the first missionaries to the current efforts of the State and Mapuche intellectuals to revitalize Mapudungun in urban and rural environments. We review the contact between Mapudungun and Spanish through history as a key to understanding the processes of language planning (formal and informal, explicit and implicit) that have been developed since the first contacts between Spanish and Mapuche until today. We also analyze two initiatives that have attempted to modify the situation of the Mapuche language: the creation of a unified alphabet of Mapudungun and the constitution of the Mapuche Language Academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the dilemma of whether or not to use adaptations of literary texts as pedagogical resources in EFL teaching at the secondary level. This presentation stems from a theoretical framework, which describes some of the various forms of rewriting and analyzes, from both a social and literary perspective, the most frequently used mechanisms of adaptation; as well as the informative function it plays in the field of education. In particular, this work takes Genette's, Soriano's and Lefevere's contributions. Secondly, it shows the results of a survey to a group of teachers on the place of literature in their classes and the reasons for that place. The results of the survey led to a debate initiated at the forum of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language on adapting or not literary texts for their use in the EFL class. The conclusion proposes breaking with the elitism based on the supposed quality of readings and comes up with the using of adaptations as the possible starting point of the path towards reading the original text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the results of a study that analyzed the production of Chilean linguistics journals published during the years 2008-2010, aiming at establishing the theoretical approach that the philosophy of science can provide for the characterization of the production in the discipline and interpretation of trends, basis for a first, necessary and healthy disciplinary discussion. 362 articles were analyzed using a matrix that considered the following categories: humanistscientistic conception of linguistics, epistemic commitments, subject area and assumptions about language. The results show remarkable differences of traditions of traditions concerning the scientific and humanistic dimensions. The division has its roots in the genesis of our discipline in which the first one strongly dominates over the latter; additionally, it was possible to identify a marked tendency to approach language from hypothetical deductivist, quantitative and positivist models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a resurgence of language contact studies in Latin America. This tendency has been favored by changes in the field of linguistics, the social sciences and the humanities which have resulted in an increasing interest in linguistic diversity and in the development of more dynamic and situated approaches to language phenomena. These language contact studies have also been spurred by ideological transformations and social policies that have given visibility to both indigenous languages and peoples in the region. The papers in this issue of Lenguas Modernas explore, from new perspectives, the contact between Spanish and American languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze, from a pragmatic-semantic perspective, the interaction between the speakers' selection of lexical aspect (Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect to express their temporal representation of the events observed in a sequence of videos. Our study draws on the assumptions that speakers' choices are the result of a "thinking for speaking" process (Slobin 1997, 2003:167), and that their organization of perceptions follows a hierarchical order, as proposed by Zack in his Theory of Event Segmentation (Zacks 2001, 2007; Tversky et al 2008). We also follow París' pragmatic-semantic approach (París 2007) and assume that the lexical aspect or Aktionsart is determined by the intrinsic semantic properties of each verb prior to any compositional analysis, and that it is part of the Lexical Semantic Representation (LSR) of the verb (Verkuyl 1993, Krifka 1998, París 2007). In contrast, grammatical aspect expresses time in terms of (im)perfect intervals. Both aspectual systems interact, yielding a complex system of temporal notions encoded in the Spanish language. Our hypotheses were that the speakers' decisions on the use of (im)perfect, progressive or preterite morphosyntactic markings to express temporal notions depend on two main features: the dynamics of the event itself, and the speakers' perception of the event as a bounded or unbounded episode. The results showed that perception and verbalization are distinct instances in which the epistemic distance is determined by: 1) the experiencer, 2) the immediacy of the experience itself and 3) the properties of the perceived object. Aspectual markings present variations according to the epistemic distance the speakers' choose to express. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Latin American diatopic occurrences of the Spanish pluperfect indicative differ from the traditional uses of this tense-namely, the expression of an action in the past that occurred before another action in the past -. These occurrences can express mirativity or evidentiality, which are semantic categories present in the adstratic languages of those areas (the Quechua and Aru families in the Andean area, and Guarani in Paraguay). Although these cases have been regarded as effects of cross-linguistic influence, we must also look for the internal causes that allow such convergence. In this paper, we revisit those diatopic occurrences and argue that it is the cognitive operation involved in the use of pluperfect in language which allows not only the emergence of such discursive occurrences in American Spanish, but also their use and coexistence with more canonical uses of that tense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the theoretical problem of linguistic change from a language contact approach. In this context, we present the main theoretical contributions made by different authors who at first rejected an a priori rigid conceptualization of language change and have tried, more recently, to account for linguistic change from a multidimensional approach based on functionalist and cognitive perspectives. In this respect, Lenz's hypothesis is revisited 100 years later in the light of the renewal of the theoretical and disciplinary frameworks developed over the last 30 years. We focus particularly on the discussion of contact-induced change of Spanish in Latin America and criticize the hegemonic and stigmatizing Hispanist perspective that has prevailed in the studies of Spanish in America. Finally, we propose a theoretical and methodological approach to study Spanish in Mapuche-contact areas in which we put forward the possibility of grammatical transfers from Mapuche to Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a more dynamic model of contact-induced change. Special emphasis is placed on two types of changes induced by contact (direct and indirect). These changes are illustrated with case studies of Spanish in contact with indigenous languages in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive function of Extra-vocalisation attribution meanings is approached from the standpoint of Strategic Discourse Analysis (Menéndez 1997), within the framework of the Engagement system as understood by Appraisal Theory (Martin 2000, White 2001, 2003; Martin y White 2005; hood y Martin 2005). This theoretical perspective complements and enhances previous research on the interpersonal metafunction of language (Butler 2003; halliday 1970, 1988; halliday y Matthiessen 2004). The paper aims to determine in what ways Attribution meanings contribute to the interpersonal function and the strategic performance of a particular serie discursiva (Menéndez 1997) within the legal genre. The serie "ciclo lectivo anual mínimo" is made up of four texts: the "Convenio MECyT" (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology Agreement No. 337/03) N° 337/03, the "Declaraciones C.F.C y E" (Federal Council of Science and Education Declarations) N° 05/04 and 06/05 and the "Resolución CFE" (Federal Council of Education Resolution) N° 94/10 The findings allow us to describe the linguistic resources of Attribution and account for their different discursive functions vis-à-vis the discursive genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents some thoughts on the usage of the so called "Spanglish" language in the United States. Its aim is that of looking at the potential facilitative effect the usage of Spanglish has in helping hispanic and non-hispanic speakers, who do not share either English or Spanish, to achieve communicative goals in particular communicative contexts. The literature has acknowledged that Spanglish relies on code-switching and code-mixing, switches and mixtures which can also be described as characteristics of the hybrid identity of many Latinos in the United States. In this paper we propose to look at the phenomenon of Spanglish in its hybrid aspect, which, from our perspective, is what makes it complex and fascinating from the perspective of mixed identities in intercultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes, from an ethno-linguistic point of view, the social representations constructed by urban Mapuche, and other social actors wingka (non mapuche), about mapudungún. The data correspond to the results of the qualitative phase of a study whose aim was to describe the linguistic situation of this indigenous language in Santiago de Chile in terms of its vitality and functionality in the city. Based on semi structured interviews to urban mapuche, participant observation in urban indigenous associations and analysis of secondary sources of information, it was possible to establish a new appreciation of Mapudungun and a rescue of its symbolic identitarian (self-defining) rather than linguistic value, [which seems to be an] expression of broader processes of reethnification. At the level of language production, it is possible to observe how the traditional and natural spaces for such function (community, home) are losing ground and the emergence of others (school, language workshops), typical of a non-mapuche cultural rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe, within the framework of foreign language teaching, the way in which inexperienced Spanish-speaking readers approach a text and develop reading competence. The corpus was constituted by the recorded verbalizations of the linguistic activity that took place during the reading activity of a text in French. In such corpus, different strategies to approach and interpret a text were observed: literal restitutions in L1 as a first approach to the text; repetitions of those restitutions with the purpose of finding a coherent relation between those restitutions, and reformulations of the repetitions, all of which point to the construction of coherence between the repeated idea and the context. The use of these strategies was also observed during readings in English. Similarly, verbal interactions between readers, which re-signify each of these reading strategies, are also analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical description of social routine formulas and a didactic guide to be used in the classroom by teachers of Spanish as a foreign language. This guide is made up of one leveling of these formulas according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and it includes a description of a possible way of presenting them when teaching. The choice of this subtype of phraseological units is on, the one hand, determined by the binding force that they present in daily conversations and, on the other hand, by the neglect of these formulas in the teaching-learning process of Spanish as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-regulation, defined as the conscious process of observation and control of our own thinking processes, determines to a large extent whether a specific learning task is successful or not. A major aspect in self-regulated learning is the ability to develop and apply suitable strategies for each specific learning purpose. This, in turn, is directly influenced by motivational factors. The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical concepts that underlying self-regulation, strategies and motivation so as to describe how they are interrelated and in what ways they influence the learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a report of a research study conducted in the year 2009 that aims to describe the characteristics of the Mapuche language and their native speakers in an urban context (Santiago de Chile), from an ethnolinguistic point of view. We have considered issues such as linguistic loyalty towards the language, its urban vitality and the social representations that urban Mapuche have constructed about their native language, emphasizing the sociocultural determinants that define these aspects. In this way, we have tried to relate language to Mapuche identity in the city. In addition, we incorporate data about linguistic competence in urban Mapuche speakers, both syntactic and lexical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of the latest developments in descriptive linguistics and, specifically, in contemporary studies in English grammar , this paper presents a model of text grammar of the English language applicable to the process of teaching English as a foreign language. In particular , the model is viewed in connection with, mainly, the development of reading and writing skills. On the one hand, the aim is to delimit the model' s object of study, to identify and characterise its components, to establish its scope and, finally, to point out its comparative advantages with respect to other sentence-based models. On the other hand, some practical applications of some of the components of the proposed model are presented for the teaching of English as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]