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Audio description is an access service that translates visuals into words which are then received auditorily by end users. This article aims to compare audio descriptions created by professionals and by students in Spanish, in order to identify commonalities and divergences, if any. Part of the VIW corpus is used to that end. Although limited in size, the VIW corpus is the first open-access multilingual multimodal corpus of audio descriptions, including various audio descriptions of the same visual input, namely the short film "What happens while". The analysis presented in this paper focuses on quantitative data such as the number of words, number of AD units and sentences, as well as on the distribution of word classes. Where relevant, data are compared to general language corpora so as to highlight the specificities of the language of audio description. The paper also compares the most frequent words used by both groups, and a selection of semantic classes automatically retrieved is analysed. This article provides new insights into the language of audio description and shows the research potential of the VIW corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two intertwined objectives that are consistent with the overall goal of using an interface grammar to describe different contrasts among languages. The first one is to describe the internal structure of the English resultative construction or KR, to characterize a representative sample of the KR subtypes and to render explicit the syntax-semantics interface conditions that make it possible. KR is a Macroevent that fuses two Events--an Activity and an Event proper--in the temporal sequence of a 'causal course of Events' so that this Event is the Result of the Activity. In order to reach this characterization, it is necessary to subsume Manner under Activity, Result under Change and CAUSE under 'causal course of Events'. The second objective is to expose the features that license the presence of KR in English while permitting a scarce presence of it in Spanish. KR is the Macroevent that complements the prototypical English Event, which opposes to Spanish in so far as it projects an Activity as main verb while the Spanish Event projects an Event proper. Thus, KR is not a complementary structure for the Spanish Event. Furthermore, KR reflects the typical 'open' combinatory English style, which is quite different from the Spanish 'close' one. This means that English allows for an open set of semantic relations between two words under the same structure while Spanish prefers to reduce them to (likely) one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words meanings and their use in the language are not fixed in time. This is the case of the word humor, whose current meaning is new in Spanish, as it is attested in dictionaries. Lexicographic discourse can reveal enough data about the history of words. Therefore, the aim of this research is to find out the concept of humor that appears from the first papers in the Spanish lexicography, from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Taking Covarrubias's dictionary (1611) as a turning point, a corpus of dictionaries has been compiled to do research on how the subject of humor was treated by the selection of voices related to it. The results are sufficiently clear in respect to the prudence with which this subject was conceived, as well as to its pragmatically marked use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a contrastive analysis about the semantic field of housing in three peninsular áreas: Madrid, Sevilla and Mérida, with the results obtained applying the Cuestionario para el estudio de la norma culta de España e Hispanoamérica. Our objective is to determine the similarities and differences of the active lexicon of the speakers in this cities from a geolinguistic and diachronical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The graphic or scriptural environment of Cameroon is experiencing a process of hispanization through Spanish words and expressions. These imported words name spaces, structures and institutions. It seems that the authors of that practice do escape from the heavy socioeconomic reality they are faced with since the decade of ninety. The evasion consists of several ways. It is spatial when foreign toponyms are transposed into Cameroon context and temporal when glorious and idyllic moments of the past are brought into mind. However, escapism can be carried out through rewarding adjectives or the designation of purely positive realities. Consequently, Cameroonians use symbolic concepts like goodness, friendship, divinity, etc. in order to, according to dream or visceral wish, make positive their daily life and get out of the generalized crisis. The aim of this paper consists in analyzing that phenomenon on the basis of collected data from Cameroon towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]