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This paper offers a new approach to the alternate use of Spanish hacerse 'to make (reflexive)' and volverse 'to (re)turn (reflexive)' to express a change of state. Hacerse and volverse belong to the core of the family of change-of-state verbs in Spanish and constitute a prime example of alternating forms. The aim is to evaluate the importance of the notion of construal as an explanation to alternation. We do this by testing one of the major explanations regarding the difference between hacerse and volverse, namely that of Delbecque and van Gorp (Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2012. Hacerse y volverse como nexos pseudo-copulativos. Bulletin hispanique 114(1). 277–306, Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2015. The pseudo-copular use of the Spanish verbs hacerse and volverse: Two types of change. Cognitextes 13), who suggest that the distinction is one of construal. A sentence completion task involving priming and non-priming visual stimuli is used to investigate to what extent the distinct conceptual images associated with hacerse and volverse affect the choice of verb in given contexts. The results show little evidence of the importance of construal for the choice of verb. Instead, established V + ADJ combinations seem to have a greater impact on choosing either verb. This calls into question the applicability of construal as an explanation to alternation, especially from the perspective of choice between alternating forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concept of hate speech in online media. Hate speech is defined as offensive discourse that targets a group or individual based on inherent characteristics and may threaten social peace. The article emphasizes the intention of the speaker and the potential harmful consequences of hateful speech, which can lead to bullying, violence, and other forms of mass atrocities. The boundaries of hate speech vary across different countries and cultures, and it is often difficult to define. The article also explores the linguistic aspects of hate speech and the forms, functions, effects, and consequences it has in online media. Several papers are presented in this special issue, which analyze examples of hate speech in different contexts and languages. The aim is to provide a better understanding of hate speech and its impact on society. [Extracted from the article]

This paper deals with the semantic notion "topic", understood broadly as the notion of 'aboutness' as in "to talk about stars," and describes its various forms of expression across ten European languages. The aim is to explore and characterise how topic is construed, that is, which underlying conceptualisations are involved in the metaphorical expressions used to refer to this notion. The description is based on ten parallel versions of A. St. Exupéry's famous novel Le Petit Prince. The analysis highlights the most salient metaphors that are found in European languages and points at some differences in the topic markers used across languages. The most revealing conceptualisation of topic involves what I have called the revolving metaphor, in which the topic is seen as the centre around which our discussion or thoughts revolve, as in my thoughts revolved around her. The paper ends with a tentative discussion of to what degree the different topic metaphors can be considered dead or alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although modern surfing can be traced back to early 20th century Hawaii, only quite recently has surfing become a truly global phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the arrival of such a new cultural phenomenon as surfing to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world is managed linguistically, i.e. to account for how one goes about talking about surfing in Portuguese and Spanish. I propose to investigate how the existing surfing vocabulary in English affects surf talk in Portuguese and Spanish. On the one hand, I will determine which words are incorporated as such and which pieces are incorporated as semantic loans. On the other hand, I will describe what old, native vocabulary is adapted to fit the needs of surf talk. The results indicate that loans are used in roughly 65 per cent of the surfing terms in both Portuguese and Spanish. On a more detailed level, the surfing manoeuvres and conditions, for example, are mostly lexicalized using direct loans, as the terms rentry 're-entry' and bottom 'bottom turn' used in the title indicate. Waves, on the other hand, are most often described by means of loan translations, i.e. using Portuguese and Spanish terms reflecting English uses. For example, the goal of any surfer is to ride a tube, tubo in both Portuguese and Spanish. The main difference between the two languages is found in the manoeuvre terms, where Portuguese has introduced several own expressions (e.g. cavada and rasgada) while Spanish relies almost uniquely on direct loans from English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the contrast between two kinds of clausal complements in the shell noun construction in Portuguese, namely finite clause complements introduced by the conjunction que 'that', as in a ideia de que éramos vigiados 'the idea that we were being watched' and inflected infinitive complements, as in a idéia de tomarem chá 'the idea (for them) to have tea'. The aim is to reveal which factors motivate the choice of either the finite complement or the inflected infinitive construction. Three successively more detailed quantitative corpus analyses were carried out: a collostructional analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis and a logistic regression analysis. The results show significant differences in the constructional preferences for most nouns, but also reveal 13 nouns that frequently combine with the two complement clause constructions. With these 13 nouns, it was found that a higher degree of complement clause autonomy, complexity and verbality favored the use of the finite clause alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen is the property of Modern Language Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper addresses the early variation in what has been called the [prep_que] variable in Spanish nominal complement clauses, i.e. the alternation between de que and que in examples such as en señal (de) que lo estimo, Zulema, este anillo ofrezco (CORDE) ‘as a sign that I appreciate You, Zulema, I offer this ring’. By applying several subsequent quantitative analyses on corpus instances of the sequences N de que and N que, the locus of variation is restricted to such an extent that the variation can largely be accounted for. A collostructional analysis identifies 31 central nouns of the N de que complement clause construction. A diachronic cluster analysis delimits the temporal dimension of the variation to the 16th and 17th centuries. A distinctive collexeme analysis identifies nine nouns which are used in both constructional formats to a comparable degree: causa ‘cause’, duda ‘doubt’, esperanza ‘hope’, fe ‘faith’, opinión ‘opinion’, recelo ‘fear’, señal ‘sign(al)’, sospecha ‘suspicion’, and temor ‘fear’. Detailed contextual analysis of the use of these nine nouns by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression reveals that the use of the nouns with a determiner is correlated with the de que variant, and the use of the nouns as part of complex predicates, as in tener sospecha ‘have suspicion’, is associated with the que variant of the complement clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen ‘the agreement of the state regarding the financing’. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]