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This paper analyzes the instructions embedded in the meaning of the evidential points of view materialized by the encontrar [find] + direct object + objective predicative structure and by different tenses (conditional, imperfect, morphological future and periphrastic future) in Spanish. Besides, to show similarities and divergences between Spanish and French on this topic, translations of those structures into the latter language are proposed. The corpus is composed by actual statements taken from the CREA and Internet news portals. The theoreticalmethodological framework is provided by the Dialogical Approach to Argumentation and Polyphony, which, unlike referentialist and cognitivist perspectives of evidentiality, characterizes the evidential meaning in relation to the dialogical and polyphonic-argumentative representation posed by the enunciation regarding the discursive cause that triggers it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at showing the areas of coincidence and dissidence between the Spanish and Italian languages and the possible consequences that the contrastive factor has on the possibility of intercomprehension and on the perspective of learning both as foreign languages. The topics of intercomprehension and the learning of foreign languages are associated not only with the concepts enunciated by Umberto Eco for Romance languages, but also with languages with less structural affinity. Our focus is the pragmatic distinctions beyond structural similarities and differences, arguing that the problem of the distance and proximity of two languages is centered on cultural heritage, rather than being strictly linguistic. To this end we provide didactic resources verified in university experience which can serve to channel and make explicit the intercultural experiences of future professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to analyze, quantitatively, the contiguity relations that are established among the words appearing in the individual lists from which the lexical availability glossaries are created. To do so, a contiguity index has been developed; it allows measuring the relevance of the association between two given words when they appear together in the above mentioned lists. The paper shows the calculation of this index and offers a way to graphically represent the net of words that derives from the analysis of the individual lists of a given center of interest. The corpus that has been used for the calculation is the Léxico Disponible de la Comunidad the Madrid, which surveyed 600 informants on 20 centers of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the properties of preceding pronominal subjects in Caribbean Spanish and to provide an appropriate syntactic analysis for them. On the basis of the Head to Spec movement hypothesis proposed by Matushansky, Vicente and Citko, among others, we propose a novel analysis con cerning the conventional assumption in licensing null subjects. Concretely, it is assumed that the preceding pronominal subject is a spelled out element of the verb that has moved to Spec-IP, and this operation is realized as a clause-level compensation for the weakening of verbal inflection in Caribbean Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

After careful consideration of the need to update the term "cultura" (one of the most consulted words in the online DLE), a detailed, diacronic and comparative analysis is made of this and other current dictionaries in order to point out posible lexicographic shortcomings that would justify updating their microstructures. As a result, a better selection of lexicographic sources, as well as the need to provide adequate cultural information as demanded by the type of dictionary users, are some of the remedies recommended in this paper. Finally, a proposal is put forward exemplifying the meaning of lexicographic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the data and current models for the study of the language from the economic perspective -language economics-, this paper aims to show how the economic value of the Spanish language is perceived in the media and how news about it contribute to construct an imaginary that legitimates the value of language. To this end, a corpus consisting of texts from the Spanish periodical press between the years 2001 and 2017 is analyzed. The quantitative analysis shows the discontinuity/permanence of the discourse over time and its linkage with the media. The qualitative analysis reveals the three features that identify this type of discourse: the insistence on quantification, the enhancement of the symbolic value of language and the repetition and thematic exhaustion. This investigation is an empirical-critical work that uses tools from both Economic science and Socio-Discursive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1900s, the linguistic theory has found support in the concept of objective conjugation to explain the clitic doubling structures in Spanish. Nevertheless, these examples are not all regarded as falling within that label, and indeed only a small number manifest the properties of this phenomenon in a robust way. From this perspective, this work analyses the contexts in which the category objective conjugation is relevant under the terms that will be judged here as generally accepted by the Grammar today. Given its contrastive approach, this paper first examines the compliance of those requirements in the Spanish peninsular standard. The aim is to transfer then this analysis to the variety spoken in the Basque Country, whose pronominal system and particular clitic doubling processes suggest, as it will be corroborated here, a stronger stability in the manifestation of the objective conjugation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociodemographic conditions of rural Castilian regions have undergone many changes in the last 80-90 years. If one or two surveys in a rural nucleus were sufficient to describe at large the local language at the time of the ALPI, due to the relative homogeneity of the peninsular rural counties, at present, if we want to make a detailed linguistic study of a rural region we could not ignore neither the heterogeneity of its inhabitants and their forms of life nor the growing urban influence. This paper describes the way of proceeding to prepare a corpus and comment its data in the specific case of Sierra de Francia, a rural region located in the mountainous south of Salamanca. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper exposes the theoretical foundations of a research conducted by the author and two other colleagues whose papers on empirical findings are included in this journal too. It is supposed that the mental networks that underlie words and those that underlie their corresponding concepts are partly shared. In order to support this hypothesis some tests of word and referent association and ordering were realized by assuming that the mental image of a referent reminds us of its corresponding concept in the brain. Experimental results confirm this hypothesis in the domain of Spanish at least, some interesting conclusions on the development of verbal processing in the brain being drawn at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the appropriation by the media of intimacy which is typical of contemporary television, as evidenced in the increasing immediacy of contents and in the resulting increasing colloquial character of public discourse. In turn, these trends reflect the economic, social and cultural processes underlying the democratization of fame, and their impact on both diastratic and diaphasic intra-linguistic variation, as well as in the extensive and intensive immediatization of idiomatic and discursive traditions. The paper proposes to differentiate between feigned orality, on the one hand, and strategic or reality-simulating orality, on the other, the second one, functionally very different from the former, being closer to Homeric orality; it encompasses the "reality TV" format, where colloquialization is the result of extensive immediatization, as well as other formats based on intensive scripted immediatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that nowadays punctuation depends significantly on syntax. The identification of grammatical categories, syntactic phrases, syntactic functions and peripheral elements constitutes the main foundation to use punctuation marks, which has a clear advantage: applying objective criteria in this orthographic aspect. This paper puts a special emphasis on uses of comma and hyphen, although sometimes a reference is made about other punctuation marks. The Orthography of the Spanish Language and the New Grammar of the Spanish Language, published by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Spanish Language Academies, are the theoretical basis to this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to analyze how the historical depth of a change is a condition to establish a norm or a prescription in grammar. Besides that, the paper shows that positive or negative linguistic valorations are very labil concepts, which are conditioned of a combination of internal and external variables. The paper examines some theoretical assumptions and concepts as a previous theoretical framework to analyze five constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a group of Spanish emotion verbs, such as asustar 'to frighten' or asombrar 'to amaze', that takes as grammatical subject the cause which triggers the emotion and as first verbal object the experiencer (El violador asusta a las madres 'The rapist frightens the mothers'). Most of these verbs present an alternance in their superficial syntactic structure in such a way that the referred first verbal object can be interpreted as DO (El violador las asusta 'The rapist frightens them') or as IO (A las madres les asusta el violador 'The mothers are afraid of the rapist'). The goal of this paper is to ascertain whether these two syntactic expressions entail also differences in meaning and whether these differences are important enough to distinguish two lexical units within a polysemous word (lexical ambiguity) or, on the contrary, they can be covered by the same definition (lexical vagueness). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I describe focalizing syntactic structures in which the so-called que galicado (que used instead of the "canonical" relative pronouns or adverbs) is used. I also make reference to its origins, which several scholars of Spanish have attributed to the influence of other Romance languages. Empirical studies, however, show that que galicado seems to relate to a generalized linguistic tendency, even though the contact of Spanish with other languages, especially French, could favor its use. Several studies on the subject show that the occurrence of que galicado seems to be conditioned by dialectal regions (more frequent use in Spanish speaking Latin America than in Spain), speakers' socioeconomic status, and most of all, by the syntactic function of the focalized constituent, its grammatical category and number of syllables. Some recommendations about the use of que galicado are made in the final part of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the consideration of determiners (including articles) as an adjectival category, i.e. determining adjectives, within the context of Spanish Grammar. Determiners, it is claimed here, do not constitute an independent word category. The paper analyses terminological problems posed by terms such as determinante, actualizador, presentador etc. and discusses the different theories on determiners and their classifications. The author proposes a differentiation between intensifying and non-intensifying determiners and suggests different subcategories for each group. The last section of this paper deals briefly with multi-word determiners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on linguistics does not have a tradition of research into the so-called repeated discourse units. What is more, some aspects of this domain of speech have scarcely been studied. Binomials are one of such neglected phenomena. The present paper shows some characteristics of binomials and provides a considerable corpus in Spanish. Binomials may form part of idioms, fixed expressions, sayings, etc., but they do not constitute either idioms or sayings. Malkiel is credited with writing the first and only remarkable work on binomials. That work contributed brilliant ideas but also contained some mistakes. Here, I shall comment on both the positive and the negative aspects of Malkiel's paper. I hope that the data and the hypotheses presented in this article will prompt experts to analyse and discuss these issues on binomials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on several Spanish and Catalan idiomatic constructions which are the result of the grammaticalization of different lexical items, but which share the expression of an emphasized or intensified quantification. These idiomatic constructions are the colloquial equivalent of quantifiers such as esp. mucho(s) / mucha(s) «many» or muy «very». For example, the exact equivalent of a sentence like María is very beautiful would be María es muy guapa, but there are many expressions in colloquial Spanish which can substitute this standard structure. For instance, one can say Mira que María es guapa, where an imperative of verb mirar («to look at») is used. The imperative mira can adopt this quantitative function because it has experienced a process of grammaticalization. In our paper we will analize the syntactic properties of these constructions, contrasting Spanish and Catalan forms, and we will study in detail the syntactic uses of the grammaticalized forms mira, cuidado and vaya. The latter is a subjunctive form of Spanish verb ir «to go» [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the organization of the morphological families as networks. There are three types of families -lexical, functional and affixal- and we use, as analysis method, the concepts and tools of the Graph Theory. We analyze a sample of eight families (ancho-ensanchar, estrecho, gordo, delgado-delgazar, caliente y frío) that have an adjectival root and are antonymous. We take the families from the Base de datos de morfología del español (BDME) and we complete them with Internet searches of non-frequent or simply sporadic words. We study the centrality and clustering measures in networks: first, in lexical families, second, in the merge of lexical families with their functional and affixal families. We demonstrate how the Graph Theory is useful to analyze the organization of morphological families and their differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, morphological studies have started to focus again on compounding, from a crosslinguistic point of view as well as for the particular case of Spanish. In this paper, we will first review a number of classifications of Spanish compounds, with special attention to coordinative compounds. Then we will focus our attention on a particular kind of construction which has been sometimes included among coordinative compounds: the nominal combination (madre-hija) that appears in the relación madre-hija ('mother-daughter relationship') structure. It will be shown that there are formal characteristics which take these structures away from compounds and bring them closer to free syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will provide a detailed geographic analysis of the reach of yeísmo in a number of Latin American republics (El Salvador, Honduras, Panamá, Cuba, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay) in order to present an overview of the extent and development of this phonetic phenomenon in the Spanish spoken in America. It thus aims to build on recent studies that have attempted to assess the distribution of this feature throughout the Spanish-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Lexicography, it is very important to bear in mind the opinion of dictionary users since they also contribute to improve future editions, especially if these are aimed at the general public. On the occasion of the launching of the 23rd edition of the academic Diccionario in October 2014, I did a small search to find out how journalists, as professionals with a supposedly high level of lexical competence, had valued it. In this paper, I will examine a number of press articles published in Spanish newspapers and will discuss the comments made about this new edition that so many hopes had raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic Term Recognition from technical texts has mainly two applications: on one side, assistance to lexicographers and documentalists; and on the other side, identification of key concepts for machine translation and information retrieval. Term recognition depends on the subject domain and the lexical patterns of a given language, in our case, Spanish. In this article, we present an evaluation of three different strategies for selecting candidates to term. In a second step, each list is filtered by a set of medical affixes to provide a final proposal of terms. This paper also discusses the problems of recall and precision of each strategy and shows how these techniques have been used to compile a lexicon of medica terms and an ATR system for Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will provide a detailed geographic analysis of the reach of yeísmo in a number of Latin American republics (El Salvador, Honduras, Panamá, Cuba, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay) in order to present an overview of the extent and development of this phonetic phenomenon in the Spanish spoken in America. It thus aims to build on recent studies that have attempted to assess the distribution of this feature throughout the Spanish-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modality appears in conversational Spanish markers vamos and vaya as a result of their modal origin from subjunctive forms. Some of their implicit modal values are gone conventionalizing because of their continued interaction with certain contexts, while other ones have weakened as the textual values of these elements were strengthened. In this paper, we focus on one of the modal functions of these markers that has barely been addressed in the literature, despite its considerable functional performance. This is reaffirmation propositional function, which presents distinctive formal and functional features that allows it to be considered as an independent (sub)function of these conversational markers, and in particular, their constructional derivatives and . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a topic to which not much attention is usually paid in the studies on phonetic variation in Spanish, since these investigations are much more frequently dedicated to syllable-final s, a variable which serves as one of the most important criteria for the classification of the varieties of Spanish. Syllableinitial s, however, in the author's opinion, deserves a more detailed study, which is why both its geographic boundaries and the conditioning factors for its appearance are studied in this paper. Moreover, different theories on the origins of this phenomenon were considered, and, based on the available data, an effort was made to establish the mechanism governing this change. [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]

This paper will provide a detailed geographic analysis of the reach of yeísmo in Spain's monolingual Spanish-speaking autonomous communities, using information provided by the Atlas Lingüísticos published up to 2013, in order to present an overview of the extent and development of this phonetic phenomenon in the Spanish spoken in Spain. It thus aims to build on recent studies (Gómez & Molina, 2013) that have attempted to assess the distribution of this feature throughout the Spanish-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the acceptability of some Basque Spanish phenomena which do not appear in the Spanish guideline norm. To achieve it an acceptability survey with 40 sentences has been made to 108 Basque Spanish bilingual students at university between 18 and 20 years, who ought to describe them as right or wrong. In this survey sentences with Basque Spanish features are listed, such as demonstratives without disparaging value, ya as a positive polarity term, evidencial and modal uses of soler + infinitivo, leísmo with masculine and feminine human referents and null objects, among others. The aim is to prove whether these features are general or not in the Basque Spanish speakers and whether these speakers describe or not these features as right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grammatical treatises tell us that adverb + possessive structures are used in the spoken language, in a colloquial register, preferably in some areas of American Spanish. The aim of this paper is to describe the peculiarities of such constructions in news from the digital media. Specifically, we make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of adverbs of location in our materials that support this type of adjacent; we study the profitability of different possessives in this syntactic environment, based on the grammatical person; we seek an explanation for male-female variation in the possessive; we observe how it affects the fact that these constructions are term of preposition; and at last we provide data about their diatopical distribution in the Hispanic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the linguistic mitigation strategies employed by universitylevel speakers from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, who were interviewed within the framework of the "Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA)". This first approach to the subject in the above-mentioned city includes an analysis of the most frequent strategies and their distribution according to the variables 'gender' and 'age', as well as a comparison with the results of parallel studies carried out in Madrid and Valencia, within the framework of the same pan-Hispanic research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study that explores the linguistic and discursive mechanisms which are used in digital journalism so that citizens have access to the language of the law and to the legal terminology used by jurists and can, therefore, properly understand what happens in courts. The research is based on a corpus of news and reports about legislative and judicial subjects, selected from leading Spanish digital newspapers and broadcasted between the years 2008-2012. The corpus has gone through textual analysis with 3.4W AntConcconcordance program (2). The results point to the need to invest greater efforts in the use of clarifying strategies, taking profit of the multimodal and hypertextual dimension of digital journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no chapter devoted to discourse markers in the new grammar published by the Real Academia Española (NGLE), which is coherently structured according to lexical categories. However, these units are described in the chapter devoted to the adverb. In this paper, we present some thoughts on the way discourse markers are described in this work: to what extent the recent proposals that have been made in this field of study have been subscribed by the academics and whether the authors of the grammar have included some novelties regarding more traditional descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the origin, current usage and norms of usage of the Spanish gerund using corpora of spoken and written language. Our findings show that the present variety of uses of the gerund is a result of two very different Latin forms: the ablative form of gerund and the present participle. The convergence of these two forms is also partially responsible for the frequent disagreement among grammarians on the correctness of some usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss some orthographic innovations in the latest academic works, and provide arguments to defend possible alternatives. We specifically deal with the graphic accent in the adverb solo, in the masculine and feminine demonstrative pronouns and in words like guion 'hyphen' as well as the orthographic rules for the prefix ex and the latinisms. In addition, we present some thoughts, that could be interpreted as predictions, on possible future changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]