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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]

The aim of this paper is to examine the strategies of (im)politeness existing in public profiles in the comments provided by users of the social networks Facebook and Twitter. The publications of three Spanish political leaders have been selected: Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias; more specifically, the publication in which the mentioned individuals announced their participation in the Spanish debate about the state of the nation, which was hosted in the three cases on both Facebook and Twitter. The analysis was not performed on these publications, but on the comments that other users wrote in such publications. The main conclusion is the dominance of discursive categories related to impoliteness. [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]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the principle of politeness proposed by Leech (1997[1983]) from a critical perspective, emphasizing the cost / benefit dichotomy, which is exemplified by interventions extracted from social networks. To do this, publications of private profiles of social network Facebook will be used as corpus. In the same way, criticism emerged about this theory -both positive and negative- will be subject to evaluation. In conclusion it is underline the overlap between the maxims of tact and generosity, as well as the fact that the maxim of sympathy can be interpreted as a hypermaxim that includes the other five. [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]

This paper focuses on the importance of acquiring intercultural pragmatic competences, to be intended as the development of an attitude towards all languages that, however, the teacher cannot always conveys during her/his classes, with care and sufficient time, since this transmission goes beyond the classroom activity stricto sensu. As Gutiérrez Ordóñez stresses ("La competencia pragmática implica dominar la producción e interpretación de mensajes eficaces cuyo sentido no se obtiene únicamente del significado codificado y cuyas características formales aparecen adecuadas a los interlocutores y al contexto extralingüístico"), intercultural pragmatic competence is the balance between grammar and pragmatics, the ability to combine, in a suitable way, the linguistic structures and to adapt to the context and to the actors of the communicative event. Hence, the transmission of a formal category, such as statement modality during foreign language classrooms, is investigated with reference to its capability to teach to interpret the messages, in a pragmatically correct way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic classification of names discriminates the collective from the senses of "grouping" and "set", however, the confluence of traits related to "meeting" or "encounter" has greatly hindered the determination of this type of expressions. In this paper, the particularities of collective names will be described, emphasizing the sense of 'collection', as a definitive feature of a nominal semantic category that presents a greater lexical variability than that described by the Grammatical Tradition and registers a defining syntactic behavior. [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]

This paper describes the meaning and uses of o así in the Spanish, and in the Spanish in contact with the Basque language. In the latter, some uses of o así attenuate the illocutionary force of the speech act, which is explained by grammaticalization. This process occurs taking into account a) the use of the Spanish o así as a reformulator for expressing attenuation; and b) the modality and evidentiality categories in the Basque conjunction edo, triggered by inferential and subjectification processes. [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 addresses a problematic issue: the possibility of coordination between elements that appear in the left margin of the utterance. The methodology is a pragmalinguistic approach and a macrosyntactic proposal applied on a corpus. The author proposes a structure of the utterance and analyses the combinatorial possibilities within the left margin, limiting the research to the coordination by conjunction y. The possible interpretations of the results are: to consider a single area on left periphery or more, and consider whether the connectives (discourse markers) belong to that area or are extrasentential elements. [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]

This paper is a contribution to the study of hedging in Spanish academic discourse. The concept of hedging and the analysis methodology proposed and developed by the group Es.Var.Atenuación are taken as a starting point, and adapted to the characteristics of academic discourse. The study is based on a corpus of the "Conclusion" chapter of 50 PhD thesis written in recent years in Spain, in which hedging is used through a large number of procedures, through wich authors hide and mitigate their assertions, as requiered by the rethoric and conventions of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compounding is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most fruitful word-formation mechanisms language has in order to produce new lexical units, words and turns of phrase. Technological and scientific progress, together with the proliferation of online social networking services and multi-platform information services, has brought about a process of lexical expansion in Spanish, which favours the creation of morpho-syntactic neologisms and, more specifically, composite neologisms. In spite of the transcendence of this situation, no reference works have been found in the field of automated compounding in this language. This circumstance has prompted the need for automated processes capable of recognizing any such words and place them in the appropriate morphological/semantic context. It is hence necessary to define automatic processes capable of identifying and creating compounds, as well as placing them in the correct linguistic context. It present an investigation based on information obtained from the BOBNEO neologisms database, in order to establish what the most successful training procedures in creating neologisms. This paper reports on the monitoring of ARGCoS -Automatic Recognition and Generation Compounds in Spanish-, a tool that allows for the identification of groups of two or more simple forms that function as a compound lexical unit, and also for the combination of two or more specific simple/compound forms in order to produce new compounds. It includes a rule dependency graph which enables the user to analyze the compounds' morpho-syntactic behaviour whilst it reflects the variety of mechanisms that activate in the formation of compounds in Spanish. Our research tool ARGCoS takes as a starting point approximately 11 000 compounds gathered from a number of lexicographical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exceptive hypothesis is expressed in current Spanish through different conjunctive phrases. The main aim of paper is to identify the discursive values and argumentative functions performed by them, highlighting the differences and similarities between them. This completes the formal description of these units. The study relies on analysis of two hundred examples of each of these phrases, taken from the CREA and CORPES XXI. Methodologically, we follow the signs of pragmatic Linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to analyze laughter as a pragmatic phenomenon, reflected in the statements endowed with irony and humor uttered by Spanish politicians during the State of the Nation debate. This analysis draws a distinction between two types of laughter: affiliation laughter, and punishment laughter -according on whether the origin of humor is in the speaker or in the listener. Such a division of laughter additionally results in the use of various conversational strategies that will depend both on the situational context and on the nature of the corpus collected. A corpus based on the initial speeches of Prime Ministers and the subsequent opposition leaders' replies in the State of the Nation debates held in the last five parliamentary terms (between 1996 and 2015) will be used to achieve our aims. The analysis will equally reveal that when laughter, applause, irony, and humor are present, the discursive strategies that they entail can have either a group-consolidation or an attack-against-the-opponent purpose. [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 is dedicated to the description of some of the peculiarities of the morphology of personal names in Spanish. First of all, our attention will be focused on the nature and formal features of their typical derivatives, i.e. the hypocoristics. We will then concentrate on the formation of diminutive forms of personal names. In Spanish this process presents some relevant peculiarities that will be described on detail. Finally, a possible descriptive approach will be offered on the basis of the specific status of proper nouns among the rest of lexical items and the special link the subgroup of personal names establish with their referents. [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]

Infant speech is the language of children under five years old, the typical language during the acquisition process of the first language. In this paper, different child language corpora are presented, from the first corpora in the form of diary studies and to the current computerized corpora. The main focus of this piece of work is to think about the issues and methodological challenges involved in this kind of research. Specifically they can be gathered in, first, how to make appropriate records in the collecting data, second, data representativeness, and third, problems derived from transcriptions, coding and labeling of the data. Moreover, ethical aspects when working with vulnerable population as children are also to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on lexical availability intends to have access to the lexicon used by the speech community members in certain communicative situations. The aim of this paper is to account for the foreign lexis found in a corpus specifically built to serve the purposes of a research project on the social conditioning of the available lexicon in Malaga town (Consolex-Project). We identified three different levels of lexical foreignness in accordance with the latest Real Academia Española (RAE) standards: foreign words, accepted foreign words and adapted foreign words. Here, we analyse the use of this particular foreign lexis and examine its correlation with the speaker's background and social stratification. Results tend to confirm both the initial hypothesis of a gradual loss of the traditional dialect lexis and parallel convergence towards the use of standard and even international words, especially by the youngest and most educated speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the alternation between que ('that') and como ('how') embedded under the perception verb ver ('to see') (Vio {que/como} llovía a cántaros 'I saw {that/how} it rained cats and dogs'). Carrasco ("Ver como verbo de percepción epistémica primaria") shows that when the complementizer is que ('that'), the sentence is ambiguous between two readings: the interpretation of primary epistemic perception and the interpretation of secondary epistemic perception. Both readings are associated with the epistemic perception because they refer to the knowledge that is connected with a visual experience. In primary epistemic perception, the belief attributed to the individual is based on a direct visual experience; in secondary epistemic perception, the belief is based on an indirect one. I propose that the complementizer como ('how') blocks the secondary epistemic interpretation. I give evidence in favor of this idea showing that if the secondary epistemic reading is forced, que ('that') cannot be replaced by como ('how'). [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]

The alternation in Spanish of más with negative adverbs in sequences like nada más vs. *más nada, nunca más vs. *más nunca has been frequently noted by different authors as a characteristic of some dialects. In this paper, we use several corpus prepared with data collected from Twitter through its public API. Thanks to this method, complementary to traditional techniques in dialectology, data are strictly synchronic for all of the Spanish-speaking areas. We selected only georeferenced data and gathered it in a MySQL relational database. Therefore, our corpus contains geographical information. Using GIS techniques for spatial analysis and open source software such as QGIS, a linguistic atlas can easily be prepared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]