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Abstract: This paper describes a preprocessing module for improving the performance of a Spanish into Spanish Sign Language (Lengua de Signos Española: LSE) translation system when dealing with sparse training data. This preprocessing module replaces Spanish words with associated tags. The list with Spanish words (vocabulary) and associated tags used by this module is computed automatically considering those signs that show the highest probability of being the translation of every Spanish word. This automatic tag extraction has been compared to a manual strategy achieving almost the same improvement. In this analysis, several alternatives for dealing with non-relevant words have been studied. Non-relevant words are Spanish words not assigned to any sign. The preprocessing module has been incorporated into two well-known statistical translation architectures: a phrase-based system and a Statistical Finite State Transducer (SFST). This system has been developed for a specific application domain: the renewal of Identity Documents and Driver''s License. In order to evaluate the system a parallel corpus made up of 4080 Spanish sentences and their LSE translation has been used. The evaluation results revealed a significant performance improvement when including this preprocessing module. In the phrase-based system, the proposed module has given rise to an increase in BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) from 73.8% to 81.0% and an increase in the human evaluation score from 0.64 to 0.83. In the case of SFST, BLEU increased from 70.6% to 78.4% and the human evaluation score from 0.65 to 0.82. [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]

The acquisition of a foreign language phonology is guided/ conditioned by many factors (psychological, cognitive, linguistic, environmental, sociolinguistic, cultural, etc.). In this paper I analyze the influence of three sociolinguistic variables (sex, language level and type of formal instruction) on the acquisition of English /v/ by native speakers of Spanish. The corpus comprises 48 interviews with Montevidean participants (Montevideo, Uruguay) with different levels of competence in English and in two different classroom situations: bilingual schools and language institutes. The analysis proves that the students' interphonology can be described and explained by an in-depth study of the variation patterns their speech shows between the target language sound [v] and the Spanish-English interphonological variant [b]. A close look at how the three sociolinguistic variables -in isolation and combined- operate in the acquisition of /v/ also sheds light on theoretical issues of interest for sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new method for the description of rhetorical structures and their corresponding linguistic features in research articles in Spanish. The method is based on a critical review of different approaches focusing on this phenomenon. To this effect, we labelled a 162-research-article corpus using rhetorical moves. The corpus is representative of Chilean scientific production between 2000 and 2008. We applied statistical techniques to over the 11,000 records to account for the prototypical rhetorical moves and describe the lexico-grammatical patterns associated to them in this type of specialist texts. The results of the study demonstrate the operation of particular 'prototypical' rhetorical moves in such texts as well as the lexico-grammatical patterns which formalize the former. The research done provides valuable empirical evidence both for those aiming at the analysis of scientific discourse and those focusing on the teaching and learning of scientific writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe the perception which Spanish-speaking subjects from Santiago de Chile have of the geographical variation of Chilean Spanish in terms of three dimensions: the similarity observed in the speech of various regions in relation to their own speech, the quality attached to regional varieties, and the pleasantness perceived in them. These perceptions reveal the attitudes that the subjects have towards the regional varieties of Chilean Spanish identified by themselves. We conclude that people from Santiago de Chile have a high degree of linguistic self-esteem as they show a more favourable attitude towards the variety of Spanish spoken in the capital city and in the central region of Chile, in general, than towards the varieties spoken in the northern and southern regions. Nevertheless, in the affective dimension (pleasantness) and specially amongst people from the middle and lower classes, the southern variety increases its positive valuation, although never surpassing the positive valuation of the central region of this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this paper is to show the differences and similarities in the use of demonstrative forms in Polish and Spanish, which arise not only from differences paradigmatic (Spanish ternary system vs Polish binary system), but also pragmatic context. With the help of electronic corpora the author tries to answer the question of what factors influence the conceptualization of these deictic expressions in both languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the analysis of the specialized wine tasting language which is currently emerging in Polish in a process that incorporates translations of wine tasting notes from other languages, including Iberian Spanish. The generally unconstrained linguistic attitude of Polish wine critics leads to an easy adoption in their texts of neologisms and foreign syntactic and semantic borrowings. Seemingly untranslatable cultural constructs in the source text are identified as culturemes and need to be applied specific translational techniques to be suitably captured for the target text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to compare spanish gerundio and polish adverbial imiesłów. We examine the morphological characteristics, origin and development of these word classes. Then we focus on it's syntactic behaviour and we present some examples of discrepancies between the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses differences between Polish and Spanish tense systems. It takes into account parameters such as the quantity and the systemic organization of time (temporary relationship and reference), the existence of the compound tenses subsystem, temporal mono- and biaxiality; dislocation (displacement) of tenses. The comparison is performed by considering the typological differences between Spanish and Polish languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compare a few selected connectors which introduce different types of subordinate clauses in Spanish (conjunction -- que, pronoun -- que and adverb -- donde) and their equivalents in Polish. We also looked at a few examples of the compound sentences in Polish and tried to indicate the Spanish equivalents of the conjunctions which were used in these sentences (such as że, który, gdzie). We tried to observe the differences in the number of the exponents of these relations of subordination and their functions in two languages in question and the influence of the verb (its modal and temporal characteristics) on the use of these conjunctions. In the final part we mentioned some tendencies in creating subordinate clauses with these conjunctions, pronouns and adverbs in the spoken language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often data that should be written so they are not identical due to misspellings and typos, variations in word order, use of prefixes and suffixes, among others. Phonetic techniques for duplicate detection are not geared toward the Spanish language, which makes the identification and correction of problems such as spelling errors in texts written in this language. In this research paper we propose an algorithm called PhoneticSpanish to detect duplicate text strings which considers the presence of spelling errors in Spanish. The proposed algorithm was compared with nine techniques to detect duplicates. The results were satisfactory and the algorithm that performed better than the other techniques and demonstrate opportunities for improved analysis of information in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role that Latin played as the language of culture and prestige in the Spanish colonies of America has not been studied in depth. Especially, in the case of the viceroyalty of Peru, the lack of documents has prevented detailed research in this area. In this paper I analyze the importance of Latin in urban areas of Peru's colonial society based on documents written by Peruvian authors and published in the viceroyalty of Peru up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among these, and because of its unique nature, the Asclepiadaeum, a poem in honor of the Viceroy de la Pezuela, who arrived in Lima in 1816, stands out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the constituent features of the textual type called memoria, in the context of the legal-administrative sphere of the Colonial Era. This textual type is embedded in both the Spanish and the native American legal tradition, so it is of particular interest for the history of the Spanish language, for the textual linguistics studies and for pragmatics studies. The research also aims to demonstrate that in the Peruvian judicial system of the 16th Century there was a particular type of memoria, modeled by the convergence of the Western way of recording data and the use of quipus as Andean recording medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper describes bracketing (JUBRAN, 1996, 2006b), based on the text-interactive perspective (JUBRAN, 2006a, 2007), in data from a written Spanish conversation mediated by computer in a learning virtual environment - the educational chat - for Brazilians. We observe that bracketing is one of the regularities in the text construction in the chat analyzed. We verifity that bracketing is, therefore, a strategy of text construction, and a very productive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper an updated overview of the main errors that Spanish students make when writing the English exam in the University Entrance Examination is provided. To do so, a Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) (Dagneaux, Denness & Granger, 1998) was conducted on a representative sample of the students who took the exam in June 2008 in Jaén, and wrote a composition on the same topic. The use of the most widely used error taxonomy, the Error Tagging Manual version 1.1. (Dagneaux, Denness, Granger & Meunier, 1996), and the analysis of the results by means of descriptive statistics foster the possibility to replicate this study and move forward in the description of the students' written command in the foreign language at this stage. The comparison of the findings obtained in this study and those from previous (C)EAs on the English exam reveals that some common tendencies may be shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citation practice provides justification for arguments and allows a writer to indicate a rhetorical gap for her/his research and adopt a tone of authority. Claims must be supported with evidence, and writers must demonstrate an understanding of approaches and knowledge in their fields of specialisation, in order to persuade the examiners that the thesis is worthy of the award of a doctorate (Thompson. 2005b). Candidates need to keep the adequate interpersonal relationship with the immediate audience (the examiners). They have lo evaluate the previous research in an area of study and to be respectful with previous claims from authorities in the disciplines. They also need to position themselves in relation to other disciplinary members and highlight their individual claims. This paper investigates contrastively how interactional resources of citation and, in particular reporting verbs, arc deployed in the literature review chapters of PhD theses written in English and in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes on the Spanish and Guarani languages. This paper reports part of a research performed in a school in the city of Presidente Franco (Alto Paraná, Paraguay), with seven teachers who use two languages daily - Spanish and Guarani. The goal of the work was to analyze interactions in which the speakers - focus of the study - use and alternate different linguistic codes during speaking events. In order to develop the analyses, questions were elaborated to check the speakers' attitudes regarding the use of those languages. This study was based on the contributions of Grosjean (1982), Erickson (1989), Pereira (1999), André (1995), among others. Results have shown that these teachers use their languages in different contexts and diglossic situations, which are inherent to their community. Also although the Guarani language is part of their linguistic common use, situations on its use usually depend on the context and the subjec&tacute;s hegemonic view concerning the own language [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, inserted in the framework of the Cid studies, aims to identify the existence of a strong presence of the cult to the Virgin Mary in the Poema de Mio Cid (PMC), which articulates the battle scenes of the poem and is presented as a projection of Castile's expansionist intentions in the context of the wars of Spanish reconquest. Likewise, it seeks to demonstrate the strong French influence in the Marian cult, which can be seen throughout the text, and its adoption by the religious Peninsula, particularly in relation to the ideology of crusade that matches the changing notion of reconquest and constitutes one of the main motives of the poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to quantify the socioeconomic importance of seven phonetic characteristics (seseo, yeismo, /s/-aspiration, /x/-aspiration, /j/-assibilation, /r/-assibilation, and /n/-velarization) whose presence or absence allows distinguishing among twenty-four Spanish dialects. In order to accomplish this goal, we perform a least-square regression analysis to calculate "hedonic prices" for the abovementioned characteristics. The result is that the three more significant characteristics, which seem to operate as signs of a lower per-capita income, are seseo, /x/-aspiration and /r/-assibilation. The first of those characteristics keeps its statistical significance as a sociolinguistic marker when we restrict our analysis to the case of Spain, while /r/-assibilation keeps its statistical significance when we restrict our database to Colombian observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper presents an analysis of bare nominals unmarked for number (BNs) occurring in object position in Spanish and Catalan, on which the BN is a syntactic complement to the verb, but not a semantic argument. After describing the properties that distinguish BNs from other indefinite expressions (bare plurals, indefinite singulars preceded by un ‘a’, and bare mass terms), we argue that these BNs occur in a monadic syntactic configuration in the sense of Hale & Keyser (1998), that they denote first-order properties, and that they are combined with the verb via a modified version of Dayal's (2003) semantics for pseudo-incorporation. Specifically, the proposal consists of a lexical rule that generates the class of verbs that productively accept BN objects, plus a composition rule that treats the BN as modifier of the verb. We point out the advantages of this analysis over three other well-known semantic analyses for combining verbs with property-type nominals. Finally, we show how the analysis can be naturally extended to existential sentences, which combine with BNs although, prima facie, they do not appear to meet the lexical conditions for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This study presents some thoughts on the usage of the so called "Spanglish" language in the United States. Its aim is that of looking at the potential facilitative effect the usage of Spanglish has in helping hispanic and non-hispanic speakers, who do not share either English or Spanish, to achieve communicative goals in particular communicative contexts. The literature has acknowledged that Spanglish relies on code-switching and code-mixing, switches and mixtures which can also be described as characteristics of the hybrid identity of many Latinos in the United States. In this paper we propose to look at the phenomenon of Spanglish in its hybrid aspect, which, from our perspective, is what makes it complex and fascinating from the perspective of mixed identities in intercultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to present the most important historic reasons for which Spanish, since the mid-thirteenth century, became an official language of the Kingdom of Castile and Leon, beating the half century France and England. The effect of the imposition of castellano drecho, a term used by the King Alfonso X is normativization and homogenization of the Old Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches linguistic methods either grammatical or lexical, used by Spanish speaking participants of a communication act to express distance to their own enunciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper attempts to examine the development of Latin perfectum in three Romance languages: Spanish, French and Catalan. In particular, we focus on the relations between analogical changes and frequency of use. The languages we have chosen present various possibilities of this development. [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]

This paper describes the influence of the mother tongue when translating abstracts from Spanish into English. 80 abstracts were analyzed published in 2 Colombian scientific magazines. Text coherence and cohesion were analyzed based on the translators' attempts. During correction and drafting of those texts, relevant mistakes were found that affected the meaning of the content in the texts. In fact, this research shows how the mother tongue interferes through negative transfers in non- professional translations. When translation into English the content of the abstract, translators use Spanish structures without taking into account sociocultural aspects and text meaning, challenges faced by the so- called inverse translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the properties of a previously unnoticed passive construction found in some varieties of present day Spanish. Such construction, which we refer to as double passive (following NGRALE 2009), contains two adjacent passive complexes (Ese producto fue empezado a ser usado como conservante, Eng. That product was started to being used as a preservative), but only one of them is interpretable as a bona fide passive. We discuss the properties of this structure, suggesting that the passive (i.e., participial) morphology of the aspectual predicate (i.e., fue empezado) is uninterpretable, and obtained through a mechanism of agreement at a distance (Chomsky's 2000, 2001 Agree). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the transcription and evaluation of the corpus DIMEx100 for Mexican Spanish is presented. First we describe the corpus and explain the linguistic and computational motivation for its design and collection process; then, the phonetic antecedents and the alphabet adopted for the transcription task are presented; the corpus has been transcribed at three different granularity levels, which are also specified in detail. The corpus statistics for each transcription level are also presented. A set of phonetic rules describing phonetic context observed empirically in spontaneous conversation is also validated with the transcription. The corpus has been used for the construction of acoustic models and a phonetic dictionary for the construction of a speech recognition system. Initial performance results suggest that the data can be used to train good quality acoustic models. [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]

To teach and learn Spanish language as a foreign language involves understanding the concepto of interculturality, which asks for an investigative look to appraise social, geographical, political, cultural, pedagogical and linguistic differences among countries that, even though they speak different languages, wish to communicate each other. This paper makes part of a research project intitled "Pedagogical university narrative". In it, a trainee who is about to get her degree as a Bachelor in Modern Languages from Universidad de Caldas (Colombia) and her advisor, as principal investigator, show how in New Delhi Spanish language acquisition is permeated by cultural factors that, if not adequately addressed, become barriers hindering the integration of language to contents, feelings and expectations related to the everyday context Spanish students live in -- different from their mother language -- in a foreign speaking country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of official institutions such as the Academies of the Spanish Language and the Instituto Cervantes in the creation of a Hispanic linguistic community, which is meant to represent a guarantee of cultural unity across the Atlantic after two hundred years of independence. This article highlights the project's faults: the neocolonialist aspects of its linguistic policy, and the submission of particular members of the Spanish American academic and social elites in these metropolitan-inspired initiatives. It also examines the economic logic behind such initiatives in the global market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of morphosyntactic variables is generally grounded on the sameness of their variants at the descriptive semantic level; however, differences usually exist as to their discursive and cognitive values. Thus reflexive forms in the Spanish clitic paradigm can be seen as devices used to reinforce subject-verb agreement and generate certain meanings in discourse. Third-person se stands out among them due to its contextual versatility and the variety of uses attributed to it by descriptive grammar. However, from a functional-cognitive viewpoint it should be assumed that all such uses share a single semantic core, namely the notion that the subject becomes the endpoint of the action or process described by the verb. In this paper we will analyze syntactic and semantic variability of the position of se when adjoined to periphrases and other verbal compounds (e.g. Se puede hacer / Puede hacerse 'It can be done'). Quantitative and qualitative analysis will show that formal variation is closely related to the interpretation speakers make of the scene described in a clause, and particularly to aspects such as the salience and agentivity of the main entity in that scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite of the interest of Bolivian Spanish for Latin American dialectology, this variety is still one of the most unknown in the continent, specially from a diachronic point of view. This paper aims to be a contribution to the history of the Spanish language in the Andean part of the country. Thus, it describes the most important phonological features of this variety of Spanish at the beginning of 19th. century; the letters that María Guadalupe Cuenca de Moreno (high-level woman, born in Chuquisaca in 1790) writes to her husband from Buenos Aires in 1811 are the corpus used for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the -ndo morpheme has raised many interesting questions and debate in the history of the Spanish language. Some researchers have argued, for instance, that the high frequency in use of the -ndo morpheme is a consequence of the linguistic contact between Spanish and other languages (e.g, English and French). However, the non-standard uses of the -ndo are found in scenarios where Spanish is not in contact with other languages. This finding has motivated other analysis and proposals for the Spanish gerundio -e.g., the semantics of the -ndo form. In this paper I analyze the distribution of the gerund periphrasis with 'estar' and 'ir' in the 13th. and 15th. century. Specifically, I study the semantic constraint that the grammatical and lexical aspects impose on the distribution of the -ndo form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first formulation on restrictions on lexical insertion is to be found in generative grammar's Standard Theory (1965). However, as then understood, restrictions had a basically extralinguistic value (concerning notions such as 'animate', 'human, 'thing', 'instrument', etc.). This paper shows how the traditional concept of selection has been enhanced by the incorporation of new features, whether semantic of categorical, from the Hispanic research tradition on the field of lexical syntax. Particularly worthy of mentioning to this respect are two onomasiological dictionaries of contemporary Spanish, which differ from one another by the directionality of lexical selection. Additionally, an analysis of selectional restriction observed in the 'entourage' of lexical definitions from current semsiological Spanish dictionaries. Such analysis shows that the collocations do not differ in their syntactic-semantic behavior from the rest of language, inasmuch as the process of selection between the allocated seems to respond to the predicate > argument orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb-object-subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based mainly on conversations extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish gathered in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co Group 2002). Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective (Bravo and Briz 2004), our purpose is to describe the social effects produced by the use of certain strategies related to (im)politeness phenomena in face-to-face interaction with the ongoing negotiation of participants' face (Goffman 1967). We will refer in this paper to Culpeper's concept of authentic impoliteness (1996, 2003, 2005), aimed at describing the damage of a bearer's face. For this author, insults constitute intentionally threatening acts. However, in our study we found that some expressions commonly used for insulting or mocking can, in certain contexts, produce an affiliative social effect, strengthening feelings of solidarity within a group and of closeness between interlocutors. We call this use non-authentic impoliteness. Kienpointner (1997) and Culpeper (op. cit.) identify this impoliteness as mock impoliteness. In turn, Zimmermann (2003) uses the term anti-politeness to refer to similar strategies of impoliteness. We follow Zimmermann's concept but without restricting it to the function of creating male teen identity only. This is because in the Spanish society we observe other groups in which such identity feature is absent. We also take into account Bravo's concepts relative to the crucial role of context to consider participants' expectations and shared knowledge in a given society, such as Bravo's socio-cultural hypothesis (2003: 104; Bravo, in this volume). In our analysis of colloquial interactions, we have registered different linguistic realisations that can be classified as insults in their unmarked form. This unmarkedness is not present in all instances: In certain cases, for example, insults can encourage an interpersonal affiliation between participants. The markedness of insults depends on certain contextual factors (such as interactions between close friends) and an adequate socio-cultural contextualisation and textual co-textualisation. As mentioned above, this markedness would constitute realisations of non-authentic impoliteness. It seems then that there would be a principle of no offence between participants that characterises the communicative exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the special argumentation of the advertising messages as part of a strategy of persuasion. Considering the ability of the advertising messages language to spread its own usages, it is relevant the study of the syntactic formulas used with argumentative aim. The formulas with si (English: if) conjuction, which strengthen the creation of real or imagined situations, are very often used in printed advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper focuses on Italian existential structures and on the incidence of the clitic ci, allegedly locative, in the interpretation of the whole clause predicate, aiming to find out a link between the clitic's presence and the notorious changes in the lexical and syntactic configuration of the base verb. The comparisons made with Catalan, French and Spanish are intended to support such a hypothesis, given that these languages take haber as base verb for existential structures, whose possessive meaning has been confirmed in the first two languages, a value that seems to be subdued in the presence of the element required (hi o y, respectively) in favour of the existential interpretation of constructions such as haver-hi o il y ha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luz María Umpierre has been a member of the literary scene within the Puerto Rican diaspora since the early 1970s. One of the major contributions of her poetic work is the construction of a counter-discourse that both unveils the oppressiveness of the patriarchal model in Puerto Rican culture and unmasks the highly discriminatory practices of US culture in its portrayal of Puerto Ricans. Utilizing a sociolinguistic perspective and van Dijk's approach to the critical analysis of discourse, this paper examines Umpierre's use of linguistic and rhetorical devices in order to deconstruct the enacting, reproduction and legitimization of dominance relations by elite groups within cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing ontologies and Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic framework, which consists of anchor directory boosting, meta-searching, and heuristic filtering, to construct domain-specific Web directories. Using the framework, we have built a Web directory in the Spanish business (SBiz) domain. Experimental results show that the SBiz Web directory achieved significantly better recall, F-value, efficiency, and satisfaction rating than the benchmark directory. Subjects provided favorable comments on the SBiz Web directory. This research thus contributes to developing a useful framework for organizing domain-specific information on the Web and to providing empirical findings and useful insights for end-users, system developers, and researchers of Web information seeking and knowledge management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, I measure the contribution of knowing Catalan to finding a job in Catalonia. In the early 1980s, a drastic language policy change ( normalització) promoted the learning and use of Catalan in Catalonia and managed to reverse the falling trend of its relative use vs Castilian (Spanish). Using census data for 1991 and 1996, I estimate a significant positive Catalan premium: the probability of being employed increases between 3 and 5 percentage points if individuals know how to read and speak Catalan; it increases between 2 and 6 percentage points for writing Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]