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The article "Introduction" discusses the special issue of the journal Spanish in Context, which focuses on the study of copulas and copular sentences in Spanish and beyond. The article highlights the theoretical and empirical research being conducted on the properties of copulas, including their syntactic-semantic and pragmatic differences, as well as their variation across languages and varieties. The special issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debates and provide new insights based on naturalistic data and experimental studies. The article also mentions specific papers included in the special issue that explore topics such as the pragmatic meaning of estar-copular sentences, the acquisition of estar in L2 Spanish, the behavior of aesthetic adjectives in estar sentences, and the diachronic changes in the use of estar. Additionally, the article discusses the relevance of aspectual notions and the role of syntactic variation in explaining copula selection. Finally, the article mentions a comparative study of copulas in Spanish and other non-Romance languages, which supports the idea that non-verbal predication can be accounted for based on a finite inventory of features. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 reports the developmental stages of the acquisition of estar in stage-level predicate constructions in the L2 Spanish grammar of native speakers of French and Portuguese. Copular verbs exist in the L1s of both learner groups; however, only in Portuguese is there an aspectual contrast, with copula selection conditions that partially differ from those of ser and estar in Spanish. The study used data extracted from the Corpus de Aprendices de Español (CAES), made up of written texts produced by L2 Spanish learners from CEFR A1 to C1 levels. We attempt to analyse whether, and to what degree, these L2 learners are sensitive to estar copula restrictions in adjective constructions. Our analysis of the written production of 143 L1 French speakers and 361 L1 Portuguese speakers showed differing acquisitional patterns depending on the L1. We consider that the estar overextension, found in the learners' productions, is related to the process of developing the ability to identify the specific features that distinguish the use of copular verbs in the interlanguage of our learners. Our findings, thus, provide a more fine-grained description of the semantic representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish with special relevance to current hypotheses on Second Language Acquisition such as the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this volume examine how Spanish speakers express attention to their interlocutors (or co-participants) verbally. It is now generally accepted that subjective expressions have interactional functions, encouraging the flow of discussion and creating cohesive discourse and that there are several ways of dealing with the intersubjective or dialogic nature of language: (i) studying heteroglossia or dialoguing voices in monologic texts, (ii) focusing on how in talk-in-interaction speakers refer to information held by the co-participant, (iii) examining intersubjective markers that encode the speaker's assumptions about the co-participant. Concepts such as politeness, argumentation structure, attenuation and hedging are being used to account for the interactional dynamics examined. Moreover, several papers analyze the difference between spoken and written registers and some offer new evidence for functional paths of linguistic change. In doing so, they enrich previous accounts of modality, discourse markers, person referencing, spatial deixis and connectives in Spanish and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 adopts a relevance-theoretic perspective to analyse how chirigotas – one of the types of bands in Cádiz carnival – exploit a series of verbal and visual comic elements in order to create or reinforce local identity: (i) the names of the bands, (ii) their attire, (iii) gestures and (iv) the lyrics of their comical songs, which satirise, mock, criticise, ridicule, praise, flatter or censure events or states of affairs. These elements will be argued to make manifest assumptions, activate (private) mental frames or express attitudes about those events or states of affairs, which the audience discover are already manifest to, and shared by, its members. Checking that other people entertain similar assumptions about and/or have similar attitudes towards those events or states of affairs – i.e. the 'joy of manifestness' – will be shown to be essential for generating a feeling of in-group membership on which that of a local identity greatly depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the discourse of a specific type of meme in Spanish, the image macro, is analysed, together with several ways in which memes generate humorous effects. Two main areas are addressed: (a) how humour arises from the processing of the text in the meme (decoding of the text plus further inferential enrichment); and (b) how humour relies on specific combinations of the text and the image in the meme. The pragmatic framework used in the analysis will be relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which in previous research (especially Yus 2016) has proven to be a valid foundation for the analysis of humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maintains that the interview, understood as an interactionally achieved social practice, can be a locus for ideological work. It shows how a differentiated understanding of stance, alignment and the discourse identities that the participants assume and leave in interaction, can bring into focus aspects of ideology that would be difficult to capture otherwise. Specifically, the paper shows how mis- and realigning actions with respect to the stances conveyed by the interview participants relative to a given subject or from a given discourse identity can lead to the construction of ideology, encouraging (or not) movement along a given interview trajectory. The ideological work observed is contingent on how the participants locate themselves and others in the interview where tensions between legitimised linguistic views and discourse identity adoption, as well as contradictions with regard to other circulating discourses emerge. The paper thus suggests that (language ideological) analyses of interview data can and should be focused on the social dynamics of the participants and how their ideological presuppositions play out in the situated interaction of the interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation is a conversation-analytic study that examines a particular type of informing sequence where the new information is received with a turn displaying ritualized disbelief. In this paper, I analyze a range of ritualized disbelief and news-confirmation turn designs in Mexican Spanish talk: I describe the trajectory that different ritualized disbeliefs have, the composition of the disbelief they display, and how news-producers deal with ritualized disbelief turns. I argue that a speaker's knowledge about the matter at hand relates to the type of disbelief expressed in his or her disbelieving turn; that is, the social actions involved in this type of sequences show a relationship between turn design, epistemics and disbelief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we put to the test the validity of the theory of isochrony using data from Chilean Spanish. Spanish has been historically classified as syllable-timed, meaning its basic unit of prosody is the syllable. However, recent studies have shown that different methods of elicitation can have a significant effect on rhythm metrics (i.e., Arvaniti 2012). The present study measured a series of rhythm metrics from samples of 30 native Chilean Spanish speakers producing spontaneous speech and reading aloud. Using MANOVA analyses, the study determined that method of elicitation had a significant effect on the metrics: while spontaneous speech tended to produce values indicative of accent-timed rhythm, reading aloud yielded values which placed them closer to the syllable-timed rhythm category. This study helps to contribute to the notion that speech rhythm is not necessarily determined by language, but rather that there are other relevant factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

The following paper focuses on the attitudes of the in-group (referred to as bilingual Veneto-Spanish speakers) and out-group (monolingual Spanish speakers) in the bilingual community of Chipilo, Mexico. This paper has two main goals: first, to analyse the attitudes of the out-group towards the in-group; and second, to analyse the perceived attitudes of the latter group, who become the primary 'determinants' in minority language maintenance. Through 108 sociolinguistic questionnaires and 15 interviews, the following social factors were examined: ethnicity, gender, level of education, and age of the speakers. The results showed negative attitudes perceived by the in-group, especially younger males of higher education levels, as well as possible tensions between the two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the elements of political discourse where persuasion is present as communicative strategy. In particular, we focus on the analysis of intonation and affectivity in a two-candidate Spanish electoral debate (Hidalgo Downing and Nieto y Otero 2014; Ponsonnet 2014; Reber 2012).The methodology consisted in selecting the openings and closings of each turn, taking the act as analysis unit (Briz 2003); for the acoustic analysis we have examined three parameters – fundamental frequency, intensity and vowel durations –, and four strategies for the positive affective bonds: assertiveness, inclusion, specificity and naturalization, in order to pursue the initial hypothesis on whether it is possible to find relations between intonation and affectivity. The analysis shows that both candidates use affective bonds and intonation to enhance persuasion, although there are interesting differences between candidates and between openings and closings. While openings show greater number and variety of strategies, both verbal and intonational, closings show lower intonational contours and less variation, therefore openings showing higher use of positive persuasive strategies, whereas in closings, there are no strategies addressed to the hearer, the most frequent being assertiveness. As for intonational contours, there is a general lowering in all values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 examines perspectives on language diversity that surfaced prior to, during, and immediately following the implementation of a two-way immersion program in a public school district in Iowa. Using a social constructionist paradigm, combined with Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere, the paper explores local and regional media coverage of the two-way immersion program alongside coverage of emerging language legislation on Official English in Iowa, spanning the last years of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st. The analysis reveals a variety of postures within the public discourse related to the presence and use of languages other than English in this Midwestern context. The paper argues that it is precisely this interface of varying perspectives that will potentially facilitate a more lasting receptive social environment towards language diversity in the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the acoustic properties of Spanish stressed mid vowels from a corpus of over 2,800 tokens produced by Galician-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. Following principles of bilingual speech production theory, we explore whether these vowels present lexically conditioned open variants [ɛ] and [ɔ] not present in monolingual Spanish. In combination with linguistic factors, we also examine whether bilingual mid-vowel production in our corpus is related to social variables. Assuming a linguistic repertoires perspective that links variation to identity performance, we argue that Spanish /e/ and /o/ are sociolinguistic variables in Galicia and that the distribution of their variants can be exploited to perform social meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitigation is a highly complex pragmatic phenomenon which has been prioritized as a subject of study in recent decades. However, because of this complexity, there is still neither a convincing definition of exactly what mitigation is nor a definitive list of the linguistic and non-verbal resources through which it is carried out. For this reason, several empirical studies which seek to explain sociopragmatic and geolectal variability in the uses and strategies of mitigation are under way. This is also the aim of our paper, included in the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA). In it, we present relevant data obtained from the comparison of what occurs in Madrid, Valencia, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Puebla (Mexico) regarding the frequency of the production of mitigation and its function in transactional interaction, together with the most productive strategies used in each community. This enables us to identify convergences and divergences and pinpoint sociopragmatic and geolectal patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present one of the most relevant linguistic phenomena of spoken Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic. The singular/plural forms of the verb haber with existential meaning have received considerable attention due to the fact that it is a linguistic variable that changes according to the variety of Spanish that is used. We report the findings from the research carried out within three speech communities: Valencia, Las Palmas and Mexico City, analysing the internal and external factors that may explain this linguistic variation. For this study we have selected these communities because all the data have been obtained according to the guidelines proposed in the PRESEEA (Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and from America). The results are the product of rigorous statistical analysis and allow us to illustrate the processes of convergence or divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the linguistic situation of pronominal clitics used as direct objects (DO) in two Spanish speech communities, Malaga and Madrid, which use, respectively, the etymological system and referential system, the two basic clitic systems that have been described for Spanish. The initial hypothesis is that both communities are undergoing a process of convergence with the educated pan-Hispanic model, which permits leísmo (use of le) with a masculine, singular person. Thus, the analyses successively restricted the corpus of clitics with the aim of determining how linguistic and social conditions affect each type of leísmo: apparent and real leísmo, leísmo with things, leísmo with a feminine person, leísmo with animals, leísmo with a masculine, plural person, and leísmo with a masculine, singular person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper compares the results obtained from the analysis of intervocalic /d/ in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with those of other PRESEEA research groups (four Spanish groups and a Latin American one). The Spanish of the Canary Islands is placed, as in other phenomena, halfway between Peninsular and Latin American Spanish. In this process of weakening, interdialectal differences in the degree of deletion of /d/ in participles and the determiner todo stand out, together with some virtually Panhispanic characteristics. The differences in the weakening of the obstruent in these two contexts are closely related to the frequency of their use in the different communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the Andalusian variety carried out in the last decades have allowed us to know, with some precision, the way in which certain factors condition the operation. The objective of this paper is to determine if some of these changes are subject to common behaviour. In our research, we focus on the changes that have some kind of prestige and we left aside the non-prestigious ones. The results have shown us a big difference between changes that operate from the top down to the bottom and those that, on the contrary, operate from the bottom upwards. This first group of changes, in addition to having a wide range of prestige and being in agreement with the national standard, these changes are relatively new. In fact, they were driven by a generation subjected to extremely marked social pressures. Currently, these prestigious processes are common throughout the entire dialect, although the rate in which they arrive on the social strata differs depending on the geographical zone. By contrast, the changes that operate from the bottom upwards are not new, they have local prestige, and they present different solutions in different geographical areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of the consonants (s) and (d) in the coda position in the city of Madrid, within the framework of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA). The purpose is to illustrate how varieties of southern Castilian Spanish and those from the central and northern Peninsula converge and diverge, taking into consideration the social, political, and economic parameters that affect said processes. The diversity of patterns that coexist in the Madrid speech community reflects the city's historic social complexity, the varied geographical origins of its migrant population, the interests that motivate each community of practice, as well as other circumstances that influence the direction of change. The analysis of (s) and (d) in coda illustrates the way in which the dynamics of variation and change in Madrid fluctuate between two poles: standardization and regionalization, the same two axes around which the community's sociolinguistic patterns revolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equatoguinean immigrants in Madrid constitute an often-overlooked group in Spanish society and in the Spanish-speaking world in general, despite the facts that Equatorial Guinea was a Spanish colony until 1968 and the Equatoguinean community in Spain is the largest outside Guinea. This paper analyzes the use of African languages and Spanish among Equatoguineans in Madrid: Do they maintain their African languages in Spain? When do they use them, and what is their significance? What connection do the interviewees observe between the use of African languages and the proficiency of Spanish spoken by different Equatoguinean ethnic groups? The results are based on ten semi-directed, sociolinguistic interviews, which occurred in Madrid in 2017 with Equatoguineans of two ethnic groups: Bubi and Fang. They show the importance of relating data to the contemporary as well as historical sociopolitical and cultural circumstances of Equatorial Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains the results of a set of perception tests that aimed at measuring perceived prosodic distances between different Romance languages (Italian, Friulian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Spanish). Data were collected within the framework of the AMPER project. The results were obtained by means of discrimination and identification tasks where the judges were 31 native speakers of Catalan form Barcelona and the stimuli were broad focus statements and yes-no questions in the above-mentioned languages. The perceived distances are then compared with the results of a dialectometric analysis of acoustic data. This comparison shows that the perceived distances are related to acoustic differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses and studies the melodic behavior of five female informants of Mexican origin or descent, three of them residents in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, and two in Mexico, one in Mexico City and the other in Puebla. There are two main objectives: firstly, to contribute to the prosodic description of Mexican Spanish on both sides of the political border between both countries (declarative statements and neutral absolute interrogatives), and secondly, to verify the continuity between the Mexican-American intonation of LA and that of MX Mexican. We followed the methodology developed by the research groups that make up Amper-Mexico and Amper-California Los Angeles, within the framework of the international AMPER project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigates DP-internal adjectives in Spanish/English code-switching (CS). Specifically, we analyze two concomitant phenomena that have been previously investigated; namely, the distributional frequency and placement of adjectives in mixed determiner phrases (DPs). A total of 1680 DPs (477 monolingual Spanish and 1203 Spanish/English DPs), extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 62 consultants from Northern Belize, were quantitatively examined. This paper is the first of its kind to examine adjectives in the innovative Spanish/English CS variety of Northern Belize, an understudied context where bilingual CS has thrived among younger generations. The distributional and statistical analyses revealed that the avoidance of Spanish attributive adjectives and overt gender marking is a distinguishing characteristic of mixed DPs but not monolingual Spanish DPs, a finding that supports Otheguy and Lapidus' (2003) adaptive simplification hypothesis. In terms of adjective placement, both the Matrix Language Frame model and the Minimalist approach to CS were able to account for mixed noun-adjective DPs, with the exception of a few cases that could only be predicted by the former model. The present analysis highlights the pivotal role that simplification and convergence play in code-switchers' optimization of linguistic resources in bi/multilingual discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of phonetic accommodation as a function of addressee target language proficiency. Specifically, it analyzes short-term adjustments in the articulation of coda consonants /s/, /ɾ/, and /n/ in the speech of eight New York Dominican Spanish speakers during a series of conversations with different addressees – a native speaker and three nonnative Spanish speakers who have varying levels of Spanish proficiency. Results demonstrate that addressee native-speaker status and proficiency play a statistically significant role in both the degree and direction of phonetic accommodation exhibited by the native speaker informants. While the informants converge with both the most- and least-proficient addressees, they initially diverge from the mid-proficient addressee. The study finds that the native speaker informants use overtly-prestigious variants to attune to the academic Spanish of the most-proficient addressees and use covertly-prestigious, emblematic variants with both the mid-proficient and native speaker addressees to demonstrate outgroup and ingroup membership, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mock Spanish is a register in which Spanish words or phrases are used in otherwise English language texts or utterances to evoke humor, often indexing an unflattering image of Spanish speakers. This paper examines the occurrence of Mock Spanish in mass media, of interest in part because its use there cannot be mitigated so much as is possible in private speech by factors such as the speaker's or writer's intentions or relationships with addressees. Participants in previous studies have cited these factors as potential attenuators of Mock Spanish's offensiveness. Mass media is also of interest for its role in the reproduction of elite discourses. This paper's objective is to further engage the question of Mock Spanish as a form of racist discourse, and to examine the implications for those who are users of Spanish as a second language or are in the business of training second language users of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on gender assignment to Spanish-English mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) have noticed a tendency to default to the masculine gender (e.g. el store). However, some studies have revealed that other factors such as the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (analogical criterion) are also relevant, particularly in written discourse (e.g. la conference). Further, it has been hypothesized that feminine-marked mixed DPs in oral discourse, which are viewed as exceptions to the default gender strategy, should be highly restricted to singleton switches (Valdés Kroff 2016). This paper investigates if feminine-marked mixed DPs are restricted to singleton switches in written discourse by analyzing a mixed-language text, which contains both types of switches (singleton and multiword). The results confirm the importance of the analogical criterion in written discourse and show that feminine-marked DPs are not restricted to singleton switches, and that the analogical criterion is relevant to both singleton and multiword switches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expanded use of patrás is among the most salient features of US Spanish and commonly attributed to English influence. For Lipski (1986), it constitutes a syntactic calque from English constructions with back; Otheguy (1999) maintains it shows cultural but not linguistic influence; Villa (2005, 2010) ascribes patrás to grammaticalization processes internal to Spanish. Previous studies lack a detailed account of the semantics of the spatial adverbial in its historical and contemporary usage. Applying Talmy’s (1983) typology of motion events to corpus data, this paper traces a grammaticalization path for patrás from its historical use to its contemporary use in Nuevomexicano Spanish. Patrás has shifted from primarily atelic backwards motion meanings to primarily telic return meanings. This shift is evident across Germanic languages for adverbs deriving from the noun back and in the Romance prefix re- from Latin adverb retro. This study proposes contact with English led to an increased frequency of satellite-framed constructions in Nuevomexicano Spanish, creating the frequency conditions for innovations in the form and meaning of para atrás to conventionalize and lead to systematic linguistic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the variation between null and overt subject pronouns found in Romance null subject languages (NSL). While it is well known that several factors regulate the distribution between these two forms, it is also well known that not all null subject languages behave the same. The contexts in which null and overt subject pronouns are required or forbidden vary across dialects, as well as their rates. This paper examines such quantitative and qualitative differences and proposes two mechanisms to explain them. In the first place, a change in progress in some varieties is responsible for the qualitative and quantitative differences found. I apply Yang's (2000) model of language change and show that NSLs can become non-NSLs only if there is enough migration, which is what happened in the varieties undergoing the change. In the second place, following Cameron (1992) and Cameron and Flores-Ferrán (2004), I claim that priming effects also play an important role in explaining the quantitative differences across several dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefactive construction dar + gerund is used in the North Andean region only and is unknown elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. Based on the analysis of spontaneous data from Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, this paper provides a linguististic description of dar + gerund and of the social and pragmatic conditions of its use. Departing from this description, I explain that the construction originates through contact with Ecuadorian Quechua. It is shown that the geographical restriction of the use of dar + gerund is directly related to the specific characteristics of Ecuadorian Quechua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the vast amount of literature that has dealt with the increasing presence of Anglicisms in multiple domains in Spanish, little attention has been paid to the use of Anglicisms by teenagers in internet forums, which have become a popular medium of communication among adolescents. This paper intends to analyze the use of Anglicisms by Spanish-speaking teenagers in this context. After having examined the contributions in www.forojovenes.com for six months (October 2015 to March 2016), the findings reveal that teenagers tend to use pure Anglicisms more frequently than other kinds; despite the existence of equivalents for some of the examined Anglicisms, the English term is chosen; the most prolific subject area to the use of Anglicisms is that of ICT. Sources such as corpus CREA, the project COLA and several well-known dictionaries have allowed to verify these uses. The employment of Anglicisms in this field may be justified in many cases, due to the lack of Spanish equivalent, but in other cases, these borrowings are connected with the prestige and sense of modernity associated with English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Copyright of Spanish in Context is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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 analyzes naturalistic data from second-generation NYC bilinguals on their obligatory subjunctive use. First-generation NYC Spanish speakers serve as the reference model for the nine obligatory semantic & syntactic contexts. A total of 52 consultants are considered, 26 for each generation, from the six primary Spanish-speaking groups in NYC: Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Colombian. The objective is to determine, through quantitative and qualitative investigation, whether the second-generation's obligatory subjunctive use has changed, and if so, to establish exactly where and how it differs from the first-generation, thus contributing to the variationist-sociolinguistic knowledge of Spanish grammar in bilingual settings. Statistically significant external and internal findings show that the two generational groups do in fact use the obligatory subjunctive differently. Close examination, however, suggests that second-generation bilinguals generally command obligatory subjunctive use, but do exhibit signs of a variable mood grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to show an original method of calculating individual lexical richness. This method leads to a non-linear optimization. A randomized algorithm, Simulated Annealing, is used in order to carry out the optimization. This procedure has allowed us to represent a function from which we obtain a reliable pattern for lexical estimation. Furthermore, this method is compatible with other traditional procedures used for the estimation of lexical richness. Therefore, in this work we have taken an alternative and more general approach: we wish to calculate the virtual richness of the individual's vocabulary. In order to validate the new model that calculates lexical richness, we carried out a pilot study based on the subjects' sociolinguistic patterns that govern their lexical richness. We have explored the lexical variation of the Spanish system that occurs during the oral exchanges of 86 speakers born in Malaga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]