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This paper attempts to explain the alternation between the prepositions a and de when used as complements to the adjectives contrario 'contrary', diferente 'different', and distinto 'distinct', as illustrated in Yo no fui distinta __mi madre 'I wasn't different __my mother', where both prepositions can be inserted. Relying on Langacker's3 notion of construal, the hypothesis is that a construes the comparison in the sense of 'direction toward' while de construes it in the sense of 'separation' or 'point of departure', and that these senses should be reflected in the usage contexts of the two prepositions. The quantitative analysis of some 800 cases extracted from Davies'4 two billion word Corpus del español, however, shows no indication of a and de setting up different construals. This lack of correlation between usage and semantics appears to be due to the diachronic generalization of a as complement of the three adjectives, thus relegating the use of de to specific collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic classification of names discriminates the collective from the senses of "grouping" and "set", however, the confluence of traits related to "meeting" or "encounter" has greatly hindered the determination of this type of expressions. In this paper, the particularities of collective names will be described, emphasizing the sense of 'collection', as a definitive feature of a nominal semantic category that presents a greater lexical variability than that described by the Grammatical Tradition and registers a defining syntactic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of the experiment of association of a number of items of color images -color names and locomotion images - locomotion names as a test to validate two hypotheses: a) if there is a ordering relationship between the cognitive domain (of images, concepts) and the semantic field of words in Spanish language (H1), and b) if a relationship exists, it is stronger in the cultural fields than in natural areas (H2). The results do not confirm that there is a close relationship between concepts and terms in Spanish language; seems to be some gradual in concepts and in terms in a cultural field such as locomotion field but this correlation is not given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]