Search

Most approaches to discourse markers tend to rely on observation on the behavior of monolingual classes of markers. In this paper, we offer a detailed analysis of the behavior and function of a single Spanish discourse marker, namely bueno , in bilingual discourse as opposed to its bilingual counterpart well. In particular, we compare pragmatic factors, and namely fine-grained differences between Spanish bueno and English well , with interactional factors such as the position of the marker in monological vs. dialogical sequences. Finally, we also take into account the impact of individual linguistic choices by comparing the behavior of different speakers when using the scrutinized discourse marker. Thus, we do not only contribute to and expand on previous literature on the behavior of discourse markers, but we also offer a new perspective to further study discourse markers in situations of language contact. • The paper explains the behavior of a single Spanish DM and its English counterpart in bilingual discourse. • A methodology based on online focus groups is used to explore the functionality of the discourse marker in interactions. • The paper finds a broad range of interpersonal functions that explain the use of bueno in bilingual discourse. • An underexplored community is proposed as a focal point in the study of contact and pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the procedural meaning of the Spanish adverb apenas , proposing that it carries the procedural meaning of right-hand APPROACHING. This procedural meaning effectively accounts for various interpretations and argumentative orientations of apenas in different contexts. The analysis demonstrates that apenas consistently implies a closeness or minimality, whether in quantitative or temporal domain. The procedural meaning also explains the negative argumentative orientation of apenas. Therefore, the different meanings of apenas can be analyzed in a holistic way. Through this analysis, the study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of adverbial usage in Spanish and potentially guide analogous investigations in other languages. • The Spanish adverb apenas carries a procedural meaning. • The procedural meaning can offer a holistic analysis of this adverb. • The procedural meaning also explains the negative argumentative orientation of apenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes impoliteness-related language in response to a season's greeting posted by the Prime Ministers of Spain and the UK on December 2022 to wish Twitter users a Felices Fiestas/Merry Christmas. A corpus made up of the first 500 tweet events mentioning Sánchez and Johnson with the @ feature was analyzed through the combination of qualitative and quantitative tools and an impoliteness2 approach to compare the most commonly deployed impoliteness strategies in response to what is felt as an offense by respondents from the two cultures. Previous impoliteness taxonomies inform the analysis (Culpeper, 1996 , 2011). Findings reveal a preference for on-record strategies vs. off-record ones in both corpora. Whereas the English respondents oriented themselves towards attacking the negative face of the Prime Minister and that of other participants with sarcasm and implicated impoliteness, the Spanish group deployed impoliteness-related language to disparage the Prime Minister's positive face through insults and the rectification of his words. The hostile acts and explicit metalanguage about emotional states in the replies to the expressive speech act corroborate the perceived breach of some aspects of the moral order on the part of the Twitter users in the out-group, hence aiding the already observed polarization of political discussions. • Impoliteness is analyzed in replies to the season's greetings of Pedro Sánchez and Boris Johnson on Twitter. • Findings indicate that on-record impoliteness strategies are more frequent than off-record ones in both groups. • English respondents use negative-face attacking strategies, sarcasm, and implicated impoliteness in their replies. • Spanish respondents deploy insults and attacks on the positive public face of the Prime Minister as favored strategies. • Impoliteness-related discourse is multifunctional and aims to restore the moral order that is perceived as altered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English vague language (VL), as in general noun phrases, general extenders and general verbs, is central to casual conversation. It can have discourse functions and create an informality and solidarity. The rationale for the study described here was a gap in the literature vis-à-vis language learner metapragmatic awareness of VL in their L1. It was hypothesised that attitudes towards VL vary from language to language. This paper describes a comparative questionnaire study of German, Spanish and Mandarin speakers' attitudes to VL in their languages. Subjects were invited to translate English VL to their languages and to think of other vague forms: German speakers volunteered 'Dingsbums' and 'und so'; Spanish speakers suggested 'cómo se llame' and 'o algo así; Mandarin speakers noted 'na ge dong xi'. Subjects were also asked to describe social variables, domains and functions associated with their VL: German speakers saw VL as creating closeness but many felt that it made addressors sound unreliable and mildly impolite; Spanish speakers mostly saw VL as a way of showing a relaxed, close, comfortable, friendly, but a few saw it as an sign of laziness and impoliteness; Mandarin speakers responded that VL was a marker of friendly informality and solidarity but they mostly associated it with indifference, laziness, impatience, irritation, anger, disappointment, contempt and dishonesty. The paper concludes with suggestions of ways to incorporate tasks on VL into English language teaching classrooms, and to raise language teachers' awareness of English L2 users' beliefs and intercultural differences in terms of VL. • Vague language forms, functions and variation. • Close with family and friends. • Indifference, impoliteness with strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, surprising amounts of news, messages, and reviews of products and services are generated in the online social media. Several efforts are being dedicated to detecting topics, as well as mining opinions in these unstructured texts. There are several approaches that compute opinion polarity, and some of them consider topics for their textual analysis. Nevertheless, discovering topics in opinions continues being challenging; due to opinions are generally short and informally written. Besides, opinions do not have a defined structure in several paragraphs; they are presented most of the time as a composition in a paragraph. In this paper, we propose a method to detect polarity in opinions by topics. Our proposal contributes to the fuzzy polarity calculation of detected topics in Spanish opinions. This method is comprised of three main steps: (1) preprocessing, (2) topic detection and (3) fuzzy polarity detection. It is important to notice the added values of this paper are: (1) the topic detection proposal based on the semantic processing when applying the clustering algorithm on opinion sentences, and (2) the evaluation of different aggregation operators for determining the opinion polarity from a fuzzy logic perspective. Aiming at assessing the quality of the resultant polarity detection by topics, we have conducted two main experiments over the Spanish corpus of opinions about Andalusian Hotels from the TripAdvisor site. The results have shown that our method is able to detect the topics correctly, as well as calculating their opinion polarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author profiling consists of extracting their demographic and psychographic information by examining their writings. This information can then be used to improve the reader experience and to detect bots or propagators of hoaxes and/or hate speech. Therefore, author profiling can be applied to build more robust and efficient Knowledge-Based Systems for tasks such as content moderation, user profiling, and information retrieval. Author profiling is typically performed automatically as a document classification task. Recently, language models based on transformers have also proven to be quite effective in this task. However, the size and heterogeneity of novel language models, makes it necessary to evaluate them in context. The contributions we make in this paper are four-fold: First, we evaluate which language models are best suited to perform author profiling in Spanish. These experiments include basic, distilled, and multilingual models. Second, we evaluate how feature integration can improve performance for this task. We evaluate two distinct strategies: knowledge integration and ensemble learning. Third, we evaluate the ability of linguistic features to improve the interpretability of the results. Fourth, we evaluate the performance of each language model in terms of memory, training, and inference times. Our results indicate that the use of lightweight models can indeed achieve similar performance to heavy models and that multilingual models are actually less effective than models trained with one language. Finally, we confirm that the best models and strategies for integrating features ultimately depend on the context of the task. • Study of large language models for conducting Author Profiling in Spanish. • Feature integration improves the performance of large language models. • Interpretability of profiles using linguistic features. • Hyperlinks and hashtag are strong features when discerning between bots and humans. • Stylometry is the linguistic category most relevant in Author Profiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the connection between Spanish concessive future and evidentiality. More specifically, it is argued that concessive future does not merely represent a contextual variant of conjectural future ( Escandell, 2010 ) but a new use ( Squartini, 2012 ) which is restricted by the activated status of the proposition ( Dryer, 1996 ). Unlike conjectural future, concessive future does not have an inferential purpose; instead, it plays a role within the (counter) argumentation process. It actually develops a déréalisant function ( Ducrot, 1995 ). Therefore, although conjectural use and concessive use share the deictic value of future, they are the projection of this value over different levels of meaning. More generally, this paper shows that future in Spanish may intersect with several semantic and discourse categories, including – but not limited to – evidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) offers immense potential as a source of support for clinical research. However, previous studies focused on extracting only a limited set of medical concepts to support information extraction in the cancer domain for the Spanish language. Building on the success of deep learning for processing natural language texts, this paper proposes a transformer-based approach to extract named entities from breast cancer clinical notes written in Spanish and compares several language models. To facilitate this approach, a schema for annotating clinical notes with breast cancer concepts is presented, and a corpus for breast cancer is developed. Results indicate that both BERT-based and RoBERTa-based language models demonstrate competitive performance in clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER). Specifically, BETO and multilingual BERT achieve F-scores of 93.71% and 94.63%, respectively. Additionally, RoBERTa Biomedical attains an F-score of 95.01%, while RoBERTa BNE achieves an F-score of 94.54%. The findings suggest that transformers can feasibly extract information in the clinical domain in the Spanish language, with the use of models trained on biomedical texts contributing to enhanced results. The proposed approach takes advantage of transfer learning techniques by fine-tuning language models to automatically represent text features and avoiding the time-consuming feature engineering process. • A deep learning-based approach for extracting breast cancer information from clinical narratives written in Spanish. • A comprehensive annotation scheme to represent medical concepts in the breast cancer domain. • A corpus manually annotated by clinicians for supporting clinical named entity recognition in the breast cancer domain. • Experiments on transformer-based language models to extract information using a breast cancer corpus. • A method to exploit transfer learning to perform cancer named entity recognition using language models that avoids feature engineering processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present paper deals with the requestive development of a consecutive trilingual boy from ages 3.6 to 5.6. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has accounted for the requestive development (i.e. use of directives) of successive trilinguals in early childhood. Yet, in previous analyses of our data involving years 2.6–3.6, we identified an increase in the use of conventionally indirect forms and a decrease in the production of direct request types coinciding with the introduction of a third language. On account of our results, we wondered whether the act of requesting would evolve differently or similarly in the three languages involved. The goal of the present paper is thus to further examine the direct, conventionally indirect and indirect forms employed during preschool years, that is, from ages 3.6 to 5.6. We hypothesized that while the three pragmatic systems were closely linked during ages 2.6 and 3.6 (e.g. indirectness in English requests affected Catalan and Spanish request forms) (i) requestive behaviour would vary across languages in line with Pau's sociolinguistic development (Barnes, 2001, 2006), and (ii) the addressee's perceived status will affect the choice of pragmalinguistic routines employed (Peccei, 1999, 2006). Data were obtained from audio and video-recordings while Pau was playing at home and there was interaction with the mother-researcher. The corpus we have analyzed includes 45 scripts of 30–60min each. The time period between recordings was 30 days. Results from our analysis confirm our two hypotheses and they shed new light on early multilingual pragmatic development by providing a multilingual focus. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract Emoji are a set of pictographs available on several electronic platforms and applications, which are gradually replacing emoticons (sequences of punctuation marks representing facial expressions). Over the last decade, researchers have proposed that emoticons not only convey emotional content in computer-mediated communication, but they may also perform pragmatic functions, such as signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring, 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson, 1993), or strengthening expressive speech acts (Skovholt et al., 2014). Despite their growing popularity, little pragmatic research to date specifically addresses emoji. The present paper bridges this gap by exploring the functions of emoji in a corpus of WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005) rapport management framework, the analysis shows that emoji are used across different domains in the corpus: they not only upgrade or downgrade different speech acts (illocutionary domain), as pointed out by previous research, but they also contribute to achieving a successful interaction by signaling closing sections or by helping to negotiate openings (discourse domain), as well as serving as a way to frame playful interactions (stylistic domain). This study also shows that some practices related to the use of emoji may be influenced by Spanish culture. Highlights • Analysis of some of the functions of emoji in WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. • Emoji upgrade or downgrade different speech acts. • Emoji help to manage the conversation, e.g. in openings and closings. • Emoji are also a stylistic choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In his study of "forms of discourse", Bernstein (1999) differentiates what he refers to as horizontal discourse (everyday, commonsense knowledge) and vertical discourse (uncommonsense knowledge). He further distinguishes in vertical discourse two distinct modalities: "hierarchical knowledge structures" and "horizontal knowledge structures". The first of these corresponds to what Maton (2014) calls "scientific culture", and the second to "humanistic culture". Bernstein proposes that knowledge in the sciences is constructed by the integration of meanings, while in social sciences and the humanities by the segmented accumulation of different "languages". In a tradition of dialogue between systemic functional linguistics and Bernstein's sociology of knowledge, and later with its further development in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014; Christie and Martin, 2007; Hood, 2010; Christie and Maton, 2011), this paper explores how the kind of knowledge structures underlying different disciplines is revealed in differences in specific discourse semantic features of comparable texts written in Spanish. The features explored in the texts of the corpus are options of the system of appraisal (Martin and White, 2005; Hood and Martin, 2005). This system provides resources to negotiate feelings, values and different voices in discourse. Analyses apply the tools of the discourse system of appraisal to explore the ways in which knowledge claims are negotiated in a set of eight discussion sections from research articles in two disciplines, Microbiology and Sociology. The findings reveal interesting disciplinary differences that haven't been explored before in the frame of the dialogue of the two theories mentioned above on texts in Spanish. These findings can inform programs of support for academic Spanish across disciplines. Highlights • Knowledge construction. • Systemic functional linguistics. • System of appraisal. • Discussion section of research articles. • Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I raise the question of how the concepts of speaker commitment and speaker involvement can be applied to evidential expressions. I therefore explore the distinction between commitment and non-commitment as a binary opposition (cf. Katriel and Dascal, 1989; Kissine, 2008 ) and show that a choice for a binary opposition leads to a clear differentiation of epistemic and evidential markers. Speaker involvement is different from speaker commitment, in that it is gradable. This notion will be relevant at both a propositional and an interactional level of analysis. At the propositional level, I claim that speaker involvement refers to the speaker’s processing of the evidential qualification when presenting a state of affairs. At the interactional level, speaker involvement will be shown to play a role in the online planning of the flow of discourse. In my corpus analysis of the Spanish evidential adverbials al parecer ‘apparently’ and por lo visto ‘seemingly’, I will argue that the coparticipant’s reply to evidentially qualified propositions is an important methodological tool to examine speaker involvement. Moreover, the monitoring of the evidential dimension in interaction will shed new light on non-commitment (cf. Déchaine et al., 2017 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A tutor for learning the Spanish Sign Language basic hand configurations. • Hand landmark extraction from a sequence of images. • Similarities between configurations using Procrustes analysis. • Multidimensional scaling analysis of the clustering of the hand configurations. Communication between people from different communities can sometimes be hampered by the lack of knowledge of each other's language. A large number of people needs to learn a language in order to ensure a fluid communication or want to do it just out of intellectual curiosity. To assist language learners' needs tutor tools have been developed. In this paper we present a tutor for learning the basic 42 hand configurations of the Spanish Sign Language, as well as more than one hundred of common words. This tutor registers the user image from an off-the-shelf webcam and challenges her to perform the hand configuration she chooses to practice. The system looks for the configuration, out of the 42 in its database, closest to the configuration performed by the user, and shows it to her, to help her to improve through knowledge of her errors in real time. The similarities between configurations are computed using Procrustes analysis. A table with the most frequent mistakes is also recorded and available to the user. The user may advance to choose a word and practice the hand configurations needed for that word. Sign languages have been historically neglected and deaf people still face important challenges in their daily activities. This research is a first step in the development of a Spanish Sign Language tutor and the tool is available as open source. A multidimensional scaling analysis of the clustering of the 42 hand configurations induced by Procrustes similarity is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past perfective on the Spanish possibility modal poder (“can”, “be able to”) can trigger either an actuality or a counterfactuality effect on the prejacent. This is surprisingly different from other languages with an overt perfective vs. imperfective distinction (French, Hindi, Greek, etc.), where past perfective morphology on a possibility modal leads to actuality entailments ( Bhatt, 1999; Hacquard, 2006 ). Contrary to previous work ( Borgonovo and Cummins, 2007; Borgonovo, 2011 ), in this paper I argue that the effects observed in Spanish are best characterized as arising pragmatically from the interaction between the discourse model of the Question Under Discussion ( Büring, 2003 ) and the Levinsonian maxims of Quantity and Informativeness. I propose that constructions with past perfective poder can be potentially ambiguous between the two readings, whereas those with past imperfective poder are just vague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insubordination studies often refer to some prosodic features of insubordinated constructions but, to date, no systematic research has been carried out on the effects of insubordination on prosody. This paper analyzes the prosody of both independent and semi-dependent clauses, with subordination marks, using a corpus of 1,230 utterances. The data show that while subordinate and elliptical clauses that can recover the elided clause show prosodic markings of continuation (rising boundary tones), insubordinated clauses do not. In a word, the level of dependence of a grammatical construction with subordination marks is reflected in its prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses anaphoric reference to clausally introduced propositions in Spanish. Although Spanish “canonically” uses the clitic lo as the direct object pronoun referring to these kinds of entities, its omission is also possible. This paper offers evidence showing that (lack of) knowledge on the part of the speaker about the full content of the proposition plays a role in the choice between the clitic lo and its omission: omission is possible (although not necessary) when the speaker lacks knowledge of the complete content of the proposition, whereas the opposite situation favors the use of the clitic lo . Quantitative and qualitative data supporting this idea come from the distribution of lo and its omission in the no (lo) sé (‘I don’t know’) expression, the constructions no poder decir and no saber decir (‘can’t say’) and the expression quién (lo) sabe (‘who knows’). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative study of the relationship between discourse positions and pragmatic functions of the Spanish discourse markers derived from motion verbs, namely anda , vamos , vaya and venga . These discourse markers are highly polyfunctional and concurrently have a high degree of positional freedom. The results show, first, that the position of a discourse marker and the discourse unit in which the marker is inserted restrict or activate its pragmatic functions. More particularly, discourse markers with an expressive, conative or discourse structuring function present a more increased pragmatic scope than those with a textual function operating at a more profound level of the discourse. Second, the degree of distributional freedom is related to the potential semantic-pragmatic autonomy of the discourse markers, rather than to the degree of functional diversity. In other words, discourse markers that do not necessarily depend on other discourse units (within the same turn) to convey their communicative intentions show a higher degree of positional freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the meaning of Spanish todavía , traditionally considered as a durative time adverb, sometimes translatable into English as still or yet but not always. Our main point is that the semantic content of this lexical item consists of two procedural components. The first one is a basic continuative aspectual sense, while the second instructs for the contextual incorporation of an assumption about a potential transition. This approach has several virtues. First, it allows us to maintain a parsimonious analysis, which shows that there is no need to treat todavía as two distinct lexical items with different polarities each, as some have proposed ( Bosque, 1980 ). We suggest, in contrast, that in Spanish todavía can be analysed as a single lexical item, and we account for its behaviour both in affirmative and in negative clauses. Second, we argue that the procedural component of the meaning of todavía explains its distribution patterns. It also clarifies the origin of the implicatures of various strengths about the future that may emerge when it is used. Finally, our characterisation allows us to provide an explanation of the way in which the wide range of meanings and pragmatic effects that are attached to the use of todavía (e.g. scalar readings, emphasis and concession) can be derived from the basic semantic sense we propose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi ), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the evidential particles and adverbs in Spanish are believed to have developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. This also coincides with the consolidation of scientific writing in Spanish, a genre that holds a special relation with the expression of sources of information. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to study the evolution of the Spanish evidential discourse particle al parecer (‘seemingly, apparently’) in scientific texts of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis shows that in the period under review the occurrences of the evidential particle al parecer were dominant, but they were not the only uses of this construction. It coexisted with two other constructions: a two-member construction al parecer x, pero en realidad y (‘it appears to be x, but in reality is y’) with inferential interpretation and with a construction al parecer with physical meaning ( es al parecer rómbico ; ‘it looks rhombic’). Our data suggests that only the occurrences of the grammaticalized discourse particle al parecer were purely evidential. Furthermore, it shows that the evidential meaning of the particle developed toward more indirect evidentiality during the process of fixation. In the context of the genre analyzed, all three constructions of al parecer reflect the changes in the scientific writing practices: from basing the evidences on personal observation to relying on the experiment and reporting from the common knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with previous approaches that analyze dizque ‘supposedly, allegedly’ as a purely evidential marker encoding reported speech and implying epistemic modality ( Travis, 2006; Olbertz, 2007 ), this paper proposes, from a Cognitive Grammar perspective, that the core meaning of dizque corresponds to a schematic representation where the veracity of events is called into question. New extensions develop to disqualify events as either false or inadequate since they lack some nuclear property of their category. It is proposed that the core meaning of dizque has changed from reportative to a pragmatic marker encoding epistemic and evaluative readings. As a nominal modifier dizque undertakes evaluative meanings, as a clause modifier it undertakes epistemic readings. Further extensions from epistemic readings imply intentions of bragging, pretending and deceiving as seen from the speaker's perspective. Evaluative and epistemic meanings have taken over the old reportative function of dizque to such extent that the complementizer que must be introduced to create a new evidential-epistemic marker que dizque, where que attests that what is being questioned was expressed by some unidentified source and dizque questions the veracity of the clause. Finally, the emergence of an even newer epistemic marker quesque emerging in Mexican informal speech is accounted for in terms of weakened evidentiality and increased epistemicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the micro-interactional co-construction of power within Spanish language concordant medical consultations in California involving a third party family member. Findings indicate the third party instigates code-switching to English on the part of medical providers, a language that the patient does not understand, rendering the patient a non-participant in the medical consultation. In these consultations involving a third party family member, monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control in ways that are similar to other powerless groups in medical consultations. Implications include the need to further examine how micro-level interactions reproduce societal ideologies and shape policy on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to classify Medical Records (MRs) by their diagnostic terms (DTs) according to the International Classification of Diseases Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). The challenge we face is twofold: (i) to treat the natural and non-standard language in which doctors express their diagnostics and (ii) to perform a large-scale classification problem. We propose the use of Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) that, for their underlying topology, constrain the allowed input DT string while synchronously produce the output ICD-9-CM class. It is outstanding their versatility to efficiently implement soft-matching operations between terms expressed in natural language to standard terms and, hence, to the final ICD-9-CM code. The FSTs were built up from a corpora and standard resources such as the ICD-9-CM and SNOMED CT amongst others. Our corpora count on a big-data comprising more than 20,000 DTs from MRs from the Basque Hospital System so as to model natural language in this domain. An F1-measure of 91.2 was achieved on a test-set of 2850 randomly selected DTs, and a random 5-fold cross validation on a training set served to double-check the stability of the provided results. Real MRs were of much help to adapt the system to natural language. Misspellings, colloquial and specific language and abbreviations made the classification process difficult. The FSTs were proven efficient in this large-scale classification task. Moreover, the composition operation for FSTs made it easy the addition of new features to the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a corpus-based examination of pragmatic marker use in Spanish as a foreign language. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, it examines the frequency and seven functional differences in the use of pues and bueno in the oral examination of 46 participants using the Computer Assisted Screening Tool (CAST) online test. The participants were adult (average age 22) non-native speaking examinees at two levels of language proficiency. The study investigated whether examinees’ proficiency level would influence the pragmatic markers’ rate of occurrence and variety of functions. Frequency measures of pragmatic markers were obtained from examinees rated at two levels of proficiency: ‘full’ or ‘fail’. 1 1 ‘Full’ and ‘fail’ are the terms used in the CAST test as descriptors of the test takers who were rated as highly proficient (‘full’), or as not meeting the criteria for highly proficient (‘fail’). In no way are they intended to disparage the efforts of any test takers. A discourse analytic approach was then employed to examine the discursive functions of pragmatic markers. The quantitative results showed that proficiency level was significantly related to the overall frequency of use of the focal markers, with the ‘full’ group tending to use them more frequently than the ‘fail’ group. Qualitatively, the study found that higher proficiency speakers used both pragmatic markers for a wider range of functions than their lower proficiency counterparts. The discussion considers the implications for raising learner awareness of pragmatic marker contributions to perceived oral fluency and pragmatic capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objectives: The diagnosis of mental disorders is in most cases very difficult because of the high heterogeneity and overlap between associated cognitive impairments. Furthermore, early and individualized diagnosis is crucial. In this paper, we propose a methodology to support the individualized characterization and diagnosis of cognitive impairments. The methodology can also be used as a test platform for existing theories on the causes of the impairments. We use computational cognitive modeling to gather information on the cognitive mechanisms underlying normal and impaired behavior. We then use this information to feed machine-learning algorithms to individually characterize the impairment and to differentiate between normal and impaired behavior. We apply the methodology to the particular case of specific language impairment (SLI) in Spanish-speaking children. Methods and materials: The proposed methodology begins by defining a task in which normal and individuals with impairment present behavioral differences. Next we build a computational cognitive model of that task and individualize it: we build a cognitive model for each participant and optimize its parameter values to fit the behavior of each participant. Finally, we use the optimized parameter values to feed different machine learning algorithms. The methodology was applied to an existing database of 48 Spanish-speaking children (24 normal and 24 SLI children) using clustering techniques for the characterization, and different classifier techniques for the diagnosis. Results: The characterization results show three well-differentiated groups that can be associated with the three main theories on SLI. Using a leave-one-subject-out testing methodology, all the classifiers except the DT produced sensitivity, specificity and area under curve values above 90%, reaching 100% in some cases. Conclusions: The results show that our methodology is able to find relevant information on the underlying cognitive mechanisms and to use it appropriately to provide better diagnosis than existing techniques. It is also worth noting that the individualized characterization obtained using our methodology could be extremely helpful in designing individualized therapies. Moreover, the proposed methodology could be easily extended to other languages and even to other cognitive impairments not necessarily related to language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study aims to gain in-depth understanding on whether and how asynchronous computer mediated communication (CMC), exemplified by advice giving in web-based discussion forums, is instrumental in the construction of gender identities and can thus be taken to reflect gendered discursive practices. While there is a growing body of literature on this topic, this paper extends the discussion into a less explored issue in the area of gender and advice, namely, the potential effect that the sex of the recipient may have on the linguistic structure of the message. Unlike advice-givers, advice-seekers unambiguously reveal their sex in their posts, while typically omitting other personal information or identifying features. Sex is thus the only identifiable variable. This study therefore examined how men and women are given advice – not just on how they produce advice – in terms of directness, politeness considerations and affect display. The picture that emerges is complex and points to potential changing discursive practices and gender role expectations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Named entity recognition is an important subfield of the broader research area of information extraction from textual data. Yet, named entity recognition research conducted on Turkish texts is still rare as compared to related research carried out on other languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. In this study, we present a hybrid named entity recognizer for Turkish, which is based on a manually engineered rule based recognizer that we have proposed. Since rule based systems for specific domains require their knowledge sources to be manually revised when ported to other domains, we enrich our rule based recognizer and turn it into a hybrid recognizer so that it learns from annotated data when available and improves its knowledge sources accordingly. The hybrid recognizer is originally engineered for generic news texts, but with its learning capability, it is improved to be applicable to that of financial news texts, historical texts, and child stories as well, without human intervention. Both the hybrid recognizer and its rule based predecessor are evaluated on the same corpora and the hybrid recognizer achieves better results as compared to its predecessor. The proposed hybrid named entity recognizer is significant since it is the first hybrid recognizer proposal for Turkish addressing the above porting problem considering that Turkish possesses different structural properties compared to widely studied languages such as English and there is very limited information extraction research conducted on Turkish texts. Moreover, the employment of the proposed hybrid recognizer for semantic video indexing is shown as a case study on Turkish news videos. The genuine textual and video corpora utilized throughout the paper are compiled and annotated by the authors due to the lack of publicly available annotated corpora for information extraction research on Turkish texts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is part of a broader research project on the multiple phenomena encompassed by the field of metalinguistics in Spanish. In particular, a corpus of Spanish metapragmatic idioms based on terms for parts of the body is analyzed. The main objective of the study is to describe the pragmatic behavior of this group of expressions, which occurs within three different sub-spheres (discursive organization; regulation of the interaction between speakers; modality). This analytical perspective is combined with a formal and functional approach to the corpus which completes the description of the real discursive value of each unit. Finally, in light of the particular nature of the corpus, the current pragmatic values of the idioms are related to the metaphorical and metonymical foundations that may have played a part in their process of grammaticalization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the last few decades the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analysing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Since the comparative work by , we know that similar information packagings may resort to completely different formal mechanisms across languages. For instance, right-dislocation (RD) is a highly productive backgrounding strategy in Catalan, but a marginal one in English, resorting in stress shift. To our current understanding, one might take this situation to be a casual state of affairs, or rather, one may raise the stronger hypothesis that understandable and definable factors exist underlying crosslinguistic variation at the syntax/information structure interface. This enterprise has been partially pursued for typologically distant languages (e.g. Catalan vs. English vs. Finnish vs. Turkish), but unlike much recent work in syntax () very little or no attention has been paid to a microparametric comparative point. Crucially, a finer-grained comparison of closely related languages may shed light on the current hypotheses concerning the syntax/information structure interface. In this paper I will pursue this task, concentrating on the role of RD in two genetically related Romance languages: Catalan, and Spanish. My first goal is to quantify the degree of productivity of RD in these two kindred languages through a corpus based analysis. The second goal is to determine the range of formal mechanisms that Spanish resorts to in order to fulfil the discourse roles typically associated with RD in Catalan. Finally, my third goal will consist of putting forward a hypothesis to explain the factors that determine the quite different discourse management of the formal mechanisms available in these two languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper focuses on how students from China are institutionally constructed through everyday practice in a Madrid middle school, where three years’ fieldwork was conducted as part of a wider research project. Particular attention is paid to the Welcome Programme at this school, a new educational measure intended for students from a migrant background to learn Spanish before they enter mainstream classes. Taking critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a theoretical/methodological/analytical framework, interactional, discursive, and ethnographic data are used to show (a) what social identities are (re)produced and challenged through school practices, in connection with the ideological framework of the modern nation-state; (b) how these practices contribute to legitimizing a particular distribution/valuation of cultural and linguistic resources within the contemporary Spanish educational system; (c) what the institutional consequences are for these Chinese newcomer students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper a conversation analysis approach is adopted as the basis for a qualitative study of the adverbial phrase muy bien, which is widely employed in evaluative and polite contexts in standard Spanish. The study shows how this expression has expanded its range of functions to act as a discourse marker in the vernacular Spanish of Castellón (Spain). In spoken discourse, muy bien has a number of different uses. For instance, it can function as an affirmative answer in reactive interventions, or as a signal of self-confirmation or self-correction in initiative turns. Moreover, it also has other metadiscursive functions such as that of introducing new topics or redirecting old ones. The multifunctionality of this adverbial phrase is a consequence of a process of pragmaticalization, that is to say, a semantic blurring away from the referential meaning towards more procedural and discursive ones in different conversational contexts. Furthermore, the issue of formal and semantic convergence with oral Catalan (in its Valencian variety) is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In contrast with previous analyses where ya has been disjunctively characterized as a temporal adverb, an aspectual and a discourse marker this paper offers a unified account as a complex grounding predication () that anchors the event with respect to the time of speech subsuming the evolutionary momentum of the event to be mapped against cultural frames. Unlike deictic markers, ya does not situate events, relations, entities or attributes by projecting them onto an objective socio-physical or temporal axis. It rather gives them a dynamic orientation by mapping them onto a programmatic base, often a cyclic one. Ya validates future or past events as most prominent for the time of speech as compared to surrounding ones that may be part of a larger action or an event chain. Ya is therefore best analyzed as a meta-linguistic focus marker that influences the conceptualization of the underlying base: it acknowledges progression within a process conceived of as globally oriented. In oral speech, ya is typically used to frame perception and propositional attitude predicates. In written language, it contributes to the framing of discourse structure at various levels of organization, especially when it comes to reflect the intertwining of parallel scenarios. The subjective perspective manifested by ya primarily relates to the course of time – the universal programmatic base par excellence – however, it also expresses more sophisticated time managing capacities and the specific mental ability of bridging gaps in linguistic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper aims to show that metaphors are a powerful tool to frame economic issues and serve certain political interests. To this purpose, we have carried out a comparative study of the conceptual metaphors of the Global Systemic Crisis in both English and Spanish. The financial crisis has indeed caused havoc in the economic panorama worldwide. Spain has been no exception, but, unlike other European countries, financial problems were initially belittled by the Spanish mass media for several months, until the subsequent outbreak of the crisis in relatively recent times. Following the current trend of corpus approaches to metaphor analysis (), our study is based on a corpus of English and Spanish financial articles selected from those published during 2007 and the end of 2008 in the English journal The Economist and the Spanish newspaper El Economista. The analysis of the metaphors used in these articles will allow us to show how the same economic reality may be differently conceptualized at different points in time on account of different socio-political factors, such as a Government which, on the verge of national elections, refused to reveal the grim state of affairs of the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: proposed a prototype semantic analysis of the English word lie, arguing that a ‘good’ lie is one containing three basic elements and that utterances lacking one or more element might still be considered lies but to lesser degrees. The present study replicated their questionnaire by applying it to Spanish in Eastern Ecuador. This paper examines whether or not the concept of a lie is different for Spanish and, if so, to what degree and under what semantic prototypical notions. The questions addressed are (1) if lie is a word in Spanish whose definition involves a prototype in the sense discussed by Coleman and Kay; (2) if there is a prototype containing the three elements considered; (3) how participants assign the word lie to reported speech acts; and (4) whether speakers generally agree on the relative weights of semantic elements. The general notion of a prototype is revealed in the Spanish data; however, the order of semantic elements is different from English. It is also argued that pragmatic and cultural considerations are more important, particularly with respect to social lies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); and (ii) what referring expressions are used to encode subject and topic. We found that the Cb is realized as subject most of the time (80% of the utterances in English and 73% in Spanish), showing that topichood and subjecthood tend to be assigned to the same entity. The preferred realization for the Cb in those cases is a pronoun in English and a zero pronoun in Spanish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present paper is a study of the way informants and interviewers make use of interactive resources in the joint construction of semi-structured interviews. It is shown that accountability, understood as the natural disposition of respondents to provide an account of what they are doing and saying, is a powerful instrument in negotiating and verifying the collective production of meaning in this particular type of ‘conversation’. The article is based on first-hand data collected from interviews with native speakers of Spanish and Danish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper explores developmental patterns in a set of grammatical constructions that Spanish speaker-writers can use for agency alternation. Although all these constructions downgrade agency, they differ in the way they do so, and in the formal devices they use for this purpose. Some promote a patient perspective (ser-marked passives and se-passives), others promote a generic interpretation of agents (se-impersonals and 2nd person singular), while still others impute a degree of autonomy to the situation denoted by the predicate (se-middles). All these constructions appear more frequently in expository texts than in narrative texts and, except for 2nd person singular pronouns, more appear in the written modality than in the spoken modality. However, only passives showed a clear developmental pattern. The study shows that, given the options of a particular language, the distribution of grammatical constructions is an outcome of communicative purposes – that is, a function of the type of text as perceived by the speaker-writer – in relation to thematic content and perceptions of written language as a discourse style. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents a novel architecture for dealing with Automatic Fake News detection. The architecture factors in the discourse structure of news in traditional digital media and is based on two premises. First, fake news tends to mix true and false information with the purpose of confusing readers. Second, this research is focused on fake news delivered in traditional digital media, so our approach considers the influence of the journalistic structure of news, and the way journalists tend to introduce the essential content in a news story using 5W1H answer. Considering both premises, this proposal deals with the news components separately because some may be true or false, instead of considering the veracity value of the news article as a unit. A two-layer architecture is proposed, Structure and Veracity layers. To demonstrate the validity of the proposal, a new dataset was created and annotated with a new fine-grained annotation scheme (FNDeepML) that considers the different elements of the news document and their veracity. Due to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, health is the chosen domain, and Spanish is the language used to validate the architecture, given the lack of research in this language. However, the proposal can be applied to any other language or domain. The performance of the Veracity layer of our proposal, which factors in the traditional news article structure and the 5W1H annotation, is capable of delivering a result of F 1 =0.807. This represents a strong improvement when compared to the baseline, which uses the whole document with a single veracity value, obtaining F 1 =0.605. These findings validate the suitability and effectiveness of our approach. • A novel Automatic Fake News detection proposal based on determining the veracity of the essential content of news articles. • A new benchmark Spanish Fake News dataset focused on health news is presented. • A new Fake News Detection architecture comprising two layers (Structure Layer and Veracity Layer) is presented. • Each layer of the architecture involves a set of phases and each phase is thoroughly described. • Performance of each layer of the architecture is measured and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, due to the great uncontrolled content posted daily on the Web, there has also been a huge increase in the dissemination of hate speech worldwide. Social media, blogs and community forums are examples where people are freely allowed to communicate. However, freedom of expression is not always respectful since offensive or insulting language is sometimes used. Social media companies often rely on users and content moderators to report on this type of content. Nevertheless, due to the large amount of content generated every day on the Web, automatic systems based on Natural Language Processing techniques are required for identifying abusive language online. To date, most of the systems developed to combat this problem are mainly focused on English content, but this issue is a worldwide concern and therefore other languages such as Spanish are involved. In this paper, we address the task of Spanish hate speech identification on social media and provide a deeper understanding of the capabilities of new techniques based on machine learning. In particular, we compare the performance of Deep Learning methods with recently pre-trained language models based on Transfer Learning as well as with traditional machine learning models. Our main contribution is the achievement of promising results in Spanish by applying multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language models such as BERT, XLM and BETO. • Addressing hate speech detection on social media for Spanish. • Comparing the performance of Deep Learning and Machine Learning models. • Evaluating recent pre-trained language models based on Transformer mechanism. • Comparing pre-trained multilingual and monolingual models available for Spanish. • Conducting an error analysis in order to understand the difficulty of the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]