Search

The aim of this paper is to present the social and stylistic variation in the speech prosody of the Spanish of Mérida, Yucatán. Assertive utterances from sociolinguistic interviews and discourse completion tasks are analyzed considering the social variables of age, gender and educational level. The prosodic analysis is carried out within the Autosegmental Metrical model (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) and with the Sp_ToBI labeling conventions (Hualde & Prieto 2015). The results show that this variety of Spanish is characterized by a prominent descent starting from the first tonal peak, the early-peak alignment in some prenuclear positions, and the presence of some non-falling boundary tones. The social and stylistic variation suggests that the last two are features that indicate vernacularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses concessive resources with a mitigating function which are found in argumentative acts in the PRESEEA corpus from Santiago, Chile. Based on data from 36 semi-structured interviews, the behaviour of concessive-oppositional moves and concessive discourse particles in argumentative acts is analyzed, and their sociolinguistic variation is described in relation to the speakers' gender, age and level of education. The key findings highlight that in Chilean Spanish there are at least 12 strategies that fulfill a mitigating concessive function, among which "sí, pero (yes, but) + negation", "aunque (even though)", "no, pero (no, but) + assertion" and "a pesar (de) que (despite the fact that)" stand out. These strategies are linked to the functions of self-protection and face prevention in the development of the argumentative act. Furthermore, it is also observed that the variation is mostly due to the subject's age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on expressions of age combined with the verbs ser and estar in the Spanish of Guatemala and Mexico. It analyses the linguistic and extralinguistic factors favoring the extension of estar and the process of linguistic change involved in the expression of age in the two dialectal groups. Based on the analysis of three linguistic corpora from these communities (one from Ciudad de México and two from Guatemala), the results show, on the one hand, that estar is the most frequent copulative form, and, on the other, that some age-related adjectives favor the extension of the copulative form: chico, chiquito, grande. The paper concludes that age expressions with ser and estar are a feature of dialectal differentiation and, at the same time, an evolution of estar at the expense of ser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compile and analyse the most frequent anglicisms in the lexicon used in sports activities offered by Spanish gyms. This domain remains unexplored in the research of the phenomenon of anglicisms in the Spanish language, since the published literature has focused so far on the lexicon of other sports such as football (Fernández 1971; Alonso 1996; Rodríguez González 2012). We have studied a sample of 268 anglicisms taken from the brochures and websites of 15 gyms. Our analysis is not only quantitative but also describes different pragmatic functions of the anglicisms found in the data. This allows us to draw significant conclusions about the evolution of anglicisms as a sociolinguistic and cultural phenomenon in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to quantify the socioeconomic importance of seven phonetic characteristics (seseo, yeismo, /s/-aspiration, /x/-aspiration, /j/-assibilation, /r/-assibilation, and /n/-velarization) whose presence or absence allows distinguishing among twenty-four Spanish dialects. In order to accomplish this goal, we perform a least-square regression analysis to calculate "hedonic prices" for the abovementioned characteristics. The result is that the three more significant characteristics, which seem to operate as signs of a lower per-capita income, are seseo, /x/-aspiration and /r/-assibilation. The first of those characteristics keeps its statistical significance as a sociolinguistic marker when we restrict our analysis to the case of Spain, while /r/-assibilation keeps its statistical significance when we restrict our database to Colombian observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]