Search

This paper aims to show the presence of thematic ordering in Spanish teaching materials in the United States, the construction of a textual series and its evolution over time, and the contribution of teachers, lexicographers, and grammarians to the history of linguistics. The vocabularies ordered by designative domains composed by Nicolas Gouin Dufief, by Edward Barry, by F. F. Moritz Foerster, by the author of ¿Habla Vm. Español?, by Luis Felipe Mantilla, by Antonio Ramos Díaz de Villegas and by Alfred Ronald Conkling constitute an interesting contribution to the history of Spanish in the US that has yet to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of a novel elliptical construction in Spanish, dubbed Topic-Remnant Elided Polar Questions (or polar TREQs in short). A detailed examination of polar TREQs in Spanish will provide evidence for the claim that (a) they are a type of clausal ellipsis, triggered by the presence of an [E]-feature on C, and (b) the remnant is a topicalized XP that undergoes movement out of the ellipsis site. Furthermore, the analysis of polar TREQs in various contexts (in particular, with respect to the so-called connectivity effects) confirms the need of syntactic identity between the linguistic antecedent and the ellipsis site. Moreover, an examination of the patterns related to the presence or absence of an overt complementizer in this elliptical construction provides empirical support for Merchant's (2001) Sluicing-COMP Generalization. In summary, this paper not only provides a comprehensive account of the syntactic intricacies of a new elliptical construction in Spanish, but also provides valuable insights into the broader landscape of elliptical phenomena in this language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delves into concept extraction and lexical simplification in the financial domain in Spanish. In our approach, concept extraction involves identifying relevant terms and phrases using AI language models, while lexical simplification aims to make complex financial concepts more accessible. For this study, terms were annotated in the FinT-esp financial corpus and the mT5 neural model was used for accurate term extraction. The model yielded remarkable results: 96% of the detected terms had not been manually annotated before, showcasing its noteworthy generative capability. For lexical simplification, the paper proposes three main strategies: paraphrasing, synonym substitution, and translation, all integrated into an interactive interface that addresses the issue of sentence length. This research significantly contributes to financial concept detection and offers an effective method for simplifying financial language in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse a corpus of 137 texts published between 1888 and 1899. These texts are included in one of the most successful Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century: Las Novedades (New York, 1876-1918). In the analysis I will determine the linguistic ideologies and the discursive strategies used for the promotion of Hispanism and Spanish language in a sociopolitical context in which the Spanish hegemony was losing all its power at an international level. Thus, the ideologies found are divided in two different categories: the linguistic ideologies that give the language a cultural value and the linguistic ideologies that make reference to the economic and commercial value of the language. The results obtained from this analysis will contribute to understand the role of Spanish language in the United States. Furthermore, this paper presents an unpublished corpus of clear historiographic interest that contributes to clarify the panorama of Hispanism in a country like the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the translation of motion events from Spanish novels into German and English. More precisely, it focuses on three translation agents: translation students, professional translators and the neural machine translation tool DeepL. The study, contextualised in the Thinking-for-translating hypothesis (Slobin, 1997, 2000, 2003), aims at investigating whether all the information about the motion events in Spanish novels is transferred or otherwise Manner information is added, as might be expected due to intertypological differences (German and English languages are satellite-framed languages and Spanish is a verb-framed language, Talmy, 1985, 2000) and the data obtained from studies based on professional translation (cf. Slobin, 1996; Cifuentes-Férez, 2013; Molés- Cases, 2019). Overall, the results show that the way students and professionals deal with the translation of motion events is influenced by their mother tongues. However, it seems that, in general, students are more reluctant to add information about Manner in motion events than professional translators. Besides, the most observed translation technique in the case of DeepL corresponds to literal translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes, from the viewpoint of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (henceforth, SFL), the specific ways in which the structure of the Spanish clause is organized for the realization of basic experiential functions, including Participant, Process and Circumstance. Thus far, SFL-descriptive work on Spanish has given little attention to the ways in which units and classes of units are organized along the rank scale of this language and how this organization contributes to the structural configuration of types of process. Based on the principles derived from the SFL theoretical dimensions of axis and rank, this article accounts for Spanishspecific resources at stake, first, in the realization of nuclear clause functions such as Process and Participant, and then in the realization of peripheral circumstantial elements. The paper finally addresses the key implications of the approach adopted to the account of the Spanish clause as well as to the general criteria involved in the identification of basic functions in its experiential structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the effect of mood on the availability of an existential interpretation of negative words such as nadie in the complement of affective emotive factive predicates in Spanish. In these contexts, the subjunctive mood allows nadie to function as a NPI, and it may be interpreted either as a non-negated existentially quantified expression, ∃x, equivalent to alguien, or as negative universally quantified expression, ∀x¬, equivalent to the English "nobody". On the other hand, the indicative mood allows only for a negative universal interpretation, as ∀x¬. An account of this phenomenon is proposed in terms of the notion of settledness. A proposition expressed by an indicative complement is asserted, and the speaker is signaling their intention that it be settled in the context set. It is said that the proposition is grammatically settled. By expressing a proposition in the subjunctive mood, the speaker is not intending that it be settled at the time of utterance, and, as a consequence it is in a grammatically unsettled state (p/¬p: a state in which it is undetermined whether p or ¬p). A negative word such as nadie is analyzed as denoting a quantity scale <∀, ∃>. Within an asserted complement, the interpretation of nadie is fixed at the highest, most informative, point in the scale, ∀. On the other hand, within the grammatically unsettled complement of an affective predicate, which allows for scale reversal, the interpretation of nadie is not fixed. This indeterminacy allows it to assume the value of the lowest point, ∃. It is noted that this possibility provides an expressive tool which may be used to add an emphatic hue to an utterance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the use of the verbs “poder” and “conseguir” among basic level learners of Portuguese as a foreign language. These verbs in context are discussed from a semantic-pragmatic perspective, in the light of modal theories such as those of Kratzer (1977; 1981; 1991; 2008; 2012) and others, as well as the classical notions of “accomplishment” and “achievement”, according to Vendler (1957; 1967), Dowty (1979), Abusch (1985) and Smith (1997). Since the Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) and South American Spanish language pairs differ in several aspects, the objective is to verify weather or not non-facilitative transfer from Spanish to Portuguese occurs, according to Cabrelli et al. (2020). By analyzing the occurrences of these verbs in oral speech during classroom moments, the study suggests the possibility of adopting practices to raise awareness of these differences between BP and Spanish so that learners can use these forms appropriately according to their context of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the syntactic structure of a paroemiac subcategory: tautologies. We will observe the diachronic evolution of this type of formulas from the Middle Ages to the present day. The diachronic study confirms the idea according to which sententious phrases, in this case tautologies, are not transmitted in the same form from generation to generation. They adapt to the times in which they are uttered. The structures are reduced over the centuries in both French and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral and written language are constantly interrelated in literate communities. In this paper, we examine the repercussions of teaching argumentative oral discourse on the development of argumentative writing and vice versa. The participants were seventh-grade students, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the Oral-1 group, which received an oral language intervention first, followed by a written language intervention; the Esc-1 group, which received the written language intervention first, followed by the oral intervention, and the control group, who attended regular Spanish Language and Literature classes. We assessed measures of both oral and written argumentative discourse at pretest, posttest-1, and posttest-2 to determine the development of both intramodality and intermodality skills. The results showed that intramodality effects were larger for the written than for the oral language intervention. Both interventions produced intermodality effects. It is concluded that the teaching of argumentative discourse should incorporate the bidirectional influences between the oral and written modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]