Search

The goal of this note is to offer a critical review of the contrastive analysis hypothesis within the field of second language acquisition. The notions of interlanguage, universal grammar and mental grammar are discussed. Transfer is redefined as the output of underlying rules in the grammar of a second language. Through Jackendoff’s notion of a mental grammar we reconcile the contribution of structural and generative grammar to the understanding of the phenomenon of transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chomsky and his followers routinely introduce linguistic minimalism as a «program», in the sense that it merely provides some guidelines for the elaboration of grammatical theories proper. According to this orthodox interpretation, these theories can be attributed factual content, that is, content open to empirical refutation, but the program as such is immune to this type of rebuttal. This article discusses this vision of the minimalist «program» and proposes a reconceptualization of both minimalism and generativism in its different phases of development. According to this proposal, the minimalist thesis has factual content and minimalism, although it can be trivially described as programmatic, has an inescapably theoretical character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an insight on the centrality of two main paradigms of the current linguistic theory in the field of Spanish as a second/foreign language acquisition, and its operative role in teaching. Generative Grammar (GG) as well as Cognitive Grammar (CG) are mentalist models, however, its postulates on the connection between human cognition and non-native linguistic knowledge are, in many cases, opposite; therefore, these models imply different conceptions of a pedagogical grammar. Throughout the paper, it is taken into consideration the way in which they are antagonistic, but also how they can be complementary. Even though GC has been more popular in classroom teaching, current GG may have a relevant impact on the curriculum, as well as on the instruction, by presenting a greater predictive capacity to identify the learner’s difficulties in processing certain linguistic structures. Finally, other key notions on linguistic knowledge, processability, and input, regarding didactic intervention, are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this article is twofold: on the first hand, to give an account of the enormous and growing number of derivatives formed from Anglicisms in present-day European Spanish; and secondly, to examine the different derivational patterns found as well as the morphophonological, morphological and semantic variations involved in them. The article also tackles the lexicographic treatment followed in dictionaries when dealing with compound anglicisms. The data have been mainly drawn from the Spanish daily press of the last few decades and they are mostly part of those collected in the Gran diccionario de anglicismos, gda (2017) and in the recent Diccionario de anglicismos del deporte, dad (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a general summary of some of the current issues in the field of Generative Grammar, the study of the human Faculty of Language. We review some key ideas this approach to language has put forward and pursued, focusing on the basic properties of language and its interactions with other systems. We also point at some of the possibilities that a biological approach to language offers to build bridges between Linguistics and other scientific disciplines. Throughout the paper we take into consideration the advantages that incorporating some of these ideas would have in Secondary Education, -not only for the potentially intrinsic value of linguistic knowledge, but also for the impact of this approach on more general skills like observing, describing and comparing data, reasoning, providing arguments and counterarguments, formulating generalizations, analyzing, summarizing or inferring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In generative grammar it is generally assumed that argument prepositional phrases (PPs) can have two syntactic functions: argument and complement. Contrary to this assumption, I propose a unified syntactic treatment for all argument PPs, which, I suggest, is more appropriate to account for the main problems they pose. Focusing on Spanish, I will try to explain how the meaning of prepositional verbs is compositionally built by means of a lexical mechanism of coercion. My claim is based on Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon theory, a sophisticated lexicist and generative model of combination of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present a study carried out between 2009 and 2011 in Moreno, a province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. One of the objectives was to obtain information about the lexical knowledge of secondary and higher education students in order to analyze it from a generative perspective. Some results of the research affirm that lexical knowledge is weak when it concerns clitic pronouns, but it is manifested with precision when branching is used. Knowledge about the meaning of the elements that integrate lexical forms tends to enable phonological and semantic associations, as well as morphological-syntactic associations, to a lesser degree. The level of hypothesizing about the meaning of unknown lexical forms, in many cases operates by phonological association with known forms, and to a lesser degree, with the speaker's knowledge of the meaning of lexical elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to evaluate the adequacy of two types of analysis of appositive constructions: the symmetric and asymmetric analysis. Grounded in contemporary generative grammar, it is shown that the symmetric analysis requires taking several assumptions about the nature of syntax. Thus, an asymmetric analysis is presented based on an underlying symmetric relation between both parts of the apposition. This proposal neutralizes the conceptual problems of a symmetric approach and, at the same time, permits to explain (i) the predicative nature of explicative appositions, (ii) its speaker-oriented character, (iii) the adjacency condition between both parts of appositive constructions, (iv) the presence of adverbs between both parts of the apposition, and (v) the difference on scope relations between quantifiers on both parts of the apposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]